Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can affiliate links benefit or hurt my seo?
-
I have just signed up with a company to do affiliate marketing for my site. I am now in the process of reaching out to publishers and seeing who will publish my link on their site. Is there any benefit in terms of seo for having these links, and can there be any potential downside to these links as well?
-
I did a bit of Affiliate marketing for Crakrevenue a few months back White, and one thing I advise that affiliates aren't going to tell you proactively is to add rel="nofollow" on your affiliate link.
My adult affiliate site was very easy to drive substantial traffic hitting the right hot spots, and I ranked it pretty quick. In short order, many of the affiliates I was advertising for had less authority than me. So to avoid passing all that hard work to get authority to someone who was merely paying me for traffic, adding the nofollow tag was a quick fix.
You definitely WILL NOT get a benefit in SEO from an affiliate, that would just be to easy!

-
Hi again!
I think the question you are asking has been already answered in this community right here:
https://moz.rainyclouds.online/community/q/is-affiliate-duplicate-content
The conclusion is to:
- OPTION 1) Avoid identical content on affiliate sites and demand affiliate sites to write their own original content.
- OPTION 2) Demand affiliate sites to canonicalize their urls with duplicated content to your urls.
Hope that helps

-
Thank you so much for sharing this highly informative article. I have a question regarding the data feed description and duplicate content issue. If the product description on my website and the description in the product feed given to the affiliate site is identical can my site suffer due to this duplicate content or can this only negatively effect the affiliate site?
-
Hi,
I recommend you to read this article from Nicole Grodesky that explains very well the effects of affiliate marketing & links on SEO:
https://powerdigitalmarketing.com/blog/how-does-affiliate-marketing-affect-seo/
Greetings!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
Do incoming links from my feedburner account help my SEO?
Hi, I know this is kind of an amateur question. I just created my first feedburner account here http://feeds.feedburner.com/posicionamientowebenbuscadores/edxv and I noticed that all the links to my blog articles are do follow and from a PR7? Will this boost my PR or SEO? Thanks Carla
Link Building | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Are links with space considered to be the same as links with %20?
I wonder if Google would consider those three links to be the same? http://www.example.com/test page.html http://www.example.com/test page.html http://www.example.com/test+page.html
Link Building | | lucek0 -
How can I find and fix my broken links
There are a number(110) links that SEOmoz has found to have 404 errors. I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist. I cannot even find the links in our system in wordpress. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Is there a way to locate where the links are originating from?
Link Building | | careerealism0 -
Reciprocal links
Are they worth anything, if they are from relevant sites? I'm I better off avoiding linking back wherever possible?
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
A link with "return false"- OSE sees as a No Followed Link
Hello, I couldn't find a clear answer to the impact on SEO for a link written in this way: [" class="expert_info" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">](w</span>ww.yourwebsite.com<span style=) [Does the "return false" act as a "no follow"? I came across this in our link data in Open Site Explorer which lists these links all as "no follows." However, an engineer I spoke to said that it shouldn't impact search engine behavior. Any ideas? Thank you in advance! -Sarah K.](w</span>ww.yourwebsite.com<span style=)
Link Building | | OneMedical0 -
Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?
The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software. They also provide free printer drivers on their site. During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files. However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site. The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question: Would this look suspicious to Google? Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO? The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point. Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | motosantiago0 -
Is it important to have a geo modifier for local SEO link building?
If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for: "city + Keyword" and just the "keyword". When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?
Link Building | | dignan990