Hi, I'm building a website with listings of products I'm promoting.. these products have links to the advertisers site (going through CJ for the tracking obviously). From my experience my search engine ranking will be higher if i have less out going links from my site. I'm promoting about 100 products on a comparison site and i realize i might get very low 'link weight' because of so many out going link. This will probably get my SE rankings to drop... I thought about putting a "NOFOLLOW" attribute in my link... is this a good idea? Does anyone have any experience with this issue? Thank...
If you cloak your links, you can have links that look like yourdomain.com/mylink1, but they'll actually go to your affiliate link. Do a search for htaccess link cloaking, or php link cloaking. Using nofollow will help a little bit, but nowhere near as much as cloaking.
Thanks.. I check out the .htaccess redirection, it's really simple to make a single redirection, from one address to another. Does any one have any ideas of using this method (or other method) for a large scale affiliate links list? I have about 50 - 100 out-going affiliate links on my site, it's going to be a lot of work to create and manage this type of redirection for so many links.. Anyone have a solution..?
Well if all your aff links are similar (e.g affiliate.com/product-item-384) you can use a variable in your urls then use php to drop the variable into the 'real' url e.g if you send people to www.mydomain.com/product.php?p=384 , you could have a little script at product.php to move them to your affiliate link $product = $_GET['p']; $link = 'http://www.affiliate.com/product-item-'.$product.''; header("Location: $link"); PHP: You can also do this with htaccess
Clocking is not the term for trick above. Having Static looking URLS helps only if it is pointing to the internal pages in your site. Here it gets redirected to an external site which google will obviously find out. You do not get any SE related benefits from such trick. Only advantage probably is that on mouse over, people will not realise that it is pointing to an affiliate site. But for search engines, it is a link to an affiliate site and having too many of such links is bad - you loose the PR juice and you have a small probability of getting penalised for having too many affiliate links or a link farm. For SE purpose, you MUST have nofoolow on affiliate links. Actually it is best to link to a redirection page on your site and have the nofollow in it. something like products.php?id=7 (or a url rewritten form of the same) will help to hide the fact that it is an affiliate link from the visitors and nofollow for the search engines.
Thanks... that what i was thinking... i know from a long experience with seo that even if i use redirection 'tricks' google and some other SEs still "click" on that link and check where will the visitor get to by clicking there. Like I said - I have a lot of links on my site... if i use the nofollow attribute wont it look fishy for the search engines that my site has 106 links and 95 out of them are nofollow? I think it will have an impact on my ranking.. does anyone have a different point of view or suggestions? I think that even if we use the nofollow attribute the SEs still follow these links, maybe they don't index this information but i'm sure they check what the website has to offer to the visitor once they send him to this site.... I'm sure this is a big issues here.. Damaging the SEO of the site by posting affiliate links is wining and losing at the same time.. especially losing for the long run..
It also helps if you throw in a few legitimately informative links regarding your niche (with your keyword as anchor)
I suggest you should cloak your link through .htaccess 301 redirect and use "nofollow" to prevent Google bots come after because there is a link to a page with not your original contents. put this in .htaccess redirect /mygreatafflink http://www.cj.com/makemerich.html Code (markup): and when you use link in your page <a href="http://www.domain.com/mygreatafflink" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">My text</a> Code (markup): Hope this help
What? Isn't that what I suggested? The link is product.php?p=384 which redirects to affiliate.com/product-item-384 Or do you mean NOT using nofollow on the product.php?p=384 link, but somehow putting it in the header redirect instead? How can this be done?
Regarding the affiliate links...I wouldn't worry about it because the search engines know how big affiliate marketing is and they generally don't count affiliate link as "backlinks" to the merchants site anyways. I think you are complete alright without having to cloak the links...
I have to disagree some of your point. I still suggest to cloak your affiliate link and put "nofollow" for 2 reasons. not about "backlink" issue - Most people tend to not click on link with some weird appearance. - You site may got penalized for redirected to a page with no content. even using 301 redirect. I have experienced with this kind of penalty myself so that's why I highly recommended to put rel="nofollow" for link which are cloaked/redirected. It's about safety reasons. If the bot didn't crawl/follow to those page, then you are safe.