Can Affiliate Links Help With SEO?

October 13, 2008

As any SEO specialist knows, one of the main areas of search engine optimisation is linkbuilding. Links leading to your website from another act as a ‘vote’ to your site, building up its relevancy and strength in Google’s rankings.

The type of link is equally important - a one way link from a well-respected website to yours acts as a much more powerful vote than a reciprocal link from a website in a completely unrelated industry. But what about affiliate links?

An affiliate link is a one way link from one website to another, but with a parameter passed across in the URL that earns the affiliate money if the person following the link performs a particular action on the merchant’s website e.g. buy a product. It’s long been assumed by affiliates that such a link would not be seen positively by Google, as you could almost consider it a paid link, and so adding a nofollow attribute or something similar to block the flow of “link juice” is quite common.

However, a recent Search Engineers session from SMX East revealed that many search engineers working for the major search engines agree that an affiliate link from a relevant and trustworty source should be considered and assist the passing of link juice, and in turn the search engine rankings.

…In no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value.

Rik
Head Of Web Development

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1 Comment

  1. This wouldn’t pass any link juice through though if the link were to feature a redirect, as all links from the affiliate network cj.com do for example.

    So if you’re looking to use an affiliate scheme as a way of boosting your natural SEO campaign, you’ll need to use one that features links to your website direct, rather than links that are passed through a network.

    Comment by Darren Jamieson October 13, 2008 @ 5:33 pm

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