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
-
Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?
I just started doing an SEO audit and noticed I have 40,000 some odd back links from an OLD version of our site that has been moved to a subdomain. The back links are for articles that already exist on our main site. I don't think Google is picking it up as duplicate content because that site isn't being crawled anymore. Could this hurt us SEO wise? I plan on removing the site, but how long after it's been removed should those back links disappear?
Link Building | | MMAffiliate0 -
Footer Links And Link Juice
I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register /privacy /terms /search /sitemap /disclaimer /blog /register So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together? This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5
Link Building | | Ubique0 -
Reseller seo
so i have a web design firm and, when i decided i need to offer seo services i originally went with an seo reseller company. i decided to try them out on myself so i gave them 4 keywords to rank for and tried them for about 6 months. when they started, our website was in google oblivion for those 4 keywords. after 6 months some keywords are on page 1 and some at the top of page 2. the ones on page 1 are the ones i also optimized for by putting the keyword in a footer link in all my clients' sites. when i look over what they did they either wrote cheesy articles that link back to me and posted them in random places or they commented on people's blogs linking back to me. but it seemed to work. at least to get me from oblivion to page 2. now it seems to me these methods are discouraged here but they seem to do at least some good. any thoughts or comments on this?
Link Building | | dad7more0 -
Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
How can I verify who links to me?
I need to verify all the inbound links I have coming in to my site. I've tried using OSE but have been told it does not scrape many smaller sites so cannot be sure of it's accuracy (especially since when I ran it, it returned a small % of the link i know are out there). Is there a way to do this in Analytics? Or another way? Thanks
Link Building | | NiallTom0 -
How many links per week is too fast in link building?
For a new website/blog how many links per week looks suspicious or hurt the rankings?
Link Building | | aaran1 -
Can indirect linking be valuable?
I have a client who is using a SEO company (Hubshout, delete name if necessary) to boost traffic to their website. They are doing this by publishing articles and submitting them to article directories, then they use their own sites/blogs (which are valueless, PR and MozRank of zero) to point to these articles and they say that this helps boost there rankings. How? They are not linking to the clients websites, creating artificial links from their own websites to article directories instead of the clients website. Are they trying to boost the value of the article or trying to boost their own websites? How does this help out the client? It is similar to three way linking but is not.
Link Building | | Michael_Rock0