Affiliate Links for SEO Success? Forget About it!
By Igor Mordkovich on May 18, 2006 in Affiliate Marketing, SEO
Yesterday I’ve received an e-mail from one of my subscribers asking me about affiliate links and if Google will value them if the company runs it’s own Affiliate management program. I decided to write a bit about it here…
We all know (hopefully) that you get no value from those affiliate links generated by affiliate network companies. These links go through the company so that they can calculate sales, referrers and so on. Now … lately there have been just a number of companies introducing “Naked link” technology where the link does not have a code in it and thus you SHOULD get the benefit towards your SEO process.
The way it work is … they place Java code on your landing page and that is going to be calculating the referrer and so on (don’t want to get too technical … I’m not a IT/programmer person). When I mentioned that Google might look for that Java code on the landing page, the company I spoke to suggested placing the code on THEIR server, etc…
Well, ladies and gents …. it’s bull. Let me tell you why.
Do you think that Google is so dumb that they won’t be able to recognize this technique and devalue it? There are more problems to this.
1) Affiliates are skeptical in trusting this method. They are used to using a URL with tracking they recognize and they feel better going through an affiliate company like www.CJ.com www.LinkShare.com and my pick …. www.ShareASale.com
2) If this thing works now …. that doesn’t mean that it will work a year from now. So what have you gained??? You will not get as many affiliates as you want. You will try to fool Google and at the end all your eggs will sink in the basket you’ve placed them in.
My suggestion …. an affiliate program is for getting sales. Stick with that!
I’m going to disagree. I don’t think Google would have a problem with affiliate links to a site IF they could count them, so the whole “naked links” idea I think would work. BUT even if google does want to discount them I think there are other ways of doing so, which are already in place with their link analysis algorithms. As for detecting the javascript… there is so many reasons to add javascript to a page I think Google has better things to do than to find javascripts specifically for affiliate tracking.
The whole “Naked Link” philosophy is a good one but probably won’t gain traction until one or more of the big players like CJ employ it.
St0n3y | May 18, 2006 | Reply
Stoney … you’re right about getting it “traction” and until the big guys adopt to it, it won’t get too big. But think about it for a minute …… Google does not want forced links. Google discounts bought links … or at least they try to identify the ones that were not obtained “naturally”. How the heck would they just let the affiliate links be counted as natural linking and thus give full 100% credit?
My opinion …. if this thing gets big, Google will pick up on it.
Igor M. | May 18, 2006 | Reply
You’re probably right, but there is also the other side of the coin that these links are there because of a legitimate business relationship. Isn’t that what Google does like? In this case, (now that I think about it) probably not.
St0n3y | May 18, 2006 | Reply
Stoney … I am sure you know the name of this game. Affiliate = We’ll pay for you to refer. Kind of reminds me of a paid link.
Igor M. | May 19, 2006 | Reply
Can anyone recommend me affiliate programs where you can use text links?
I need to know of all the affiliate programs out there where you can use text links and that pay per click.
thanks in advance….
Franklin | Dec 15, 2006 | Reply
Franklin … thanks for visiting. I am not sure I completely understand your question.
You mean, you’re looking to use an affiliate software/network that will use clean text links for your affiliate program so that your site can benefit both ways … incoming links as well as sales?
If so … I don’t think that you’ve read the post you’re commenting on. I don’t have full knowledge on those affiliate companies that have the technology of clean links simply because I would not want to fool search engines with this tactic.
As I mentioned above … search engines know this tactic and are not avoiding it. Plus, your affiliates will not like the idea of clean links.
Igor Mordkovich | Dec 15, 2006 | Reply