Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates

Having affiliates promoting your product or service is a great thing. A decent network of affiliates can  send you large volumes of targeted visitors. But you maybe overlooking something else very valuable that you could get from your affiliates — namely, an SEO boost.

Here’s how you can increase your search engine ranking by using links from your affiliates…

Conventional affiliate links

Traditional affiliate links carry very little SEO benefit because they go through several redirections. And some times these redirections lose all SEO power that would otherwise be transferred using a clean link.

What do conventional affiliate links look like? They’re usually long and messy looking. Like this: http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348. If I were to use this affiliate link to promote 7UP, I would write a link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348">Great drink!</a>

When search engines see the snippet of markup above, they know that this page, http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348, is about a great drink. And that influences where the page is ranked in search engines.

In fact, linking with anchor text like above is the most influential SEO factor. That’s why when you type “follow me” in Google, the first website that shows up is Twitter. Many people link to Twitter using Follow Me.

But there is a big problem with the highlighted link above. When the search engine follows it and sees that it points to a page which then redirects the user and attempts to drop a cookie, the search engine realizes this is an affiliate link. It could be biased, therefore it doesn’t transfer SEO power.

But using technology and a link building strategy, you can let some of your affiliates link to you and bring all the link juice with them…

SEO affiliate links

A much more useful link for 7UP would be a direct link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/">Great drink!</a>

If enough people link to 7UP like that, pretty soon www.7up.com would be the #1 website in Google’s results pages for the keyword great drink.  Most keywords only need a handful of trusted links to start influencing search engines.

If you notice, compared to the traditional affiliate link, this SEO link is much shorter. Traditional affiliate links are long because each affiliate requires a unique link. The link usually points to a script that registers the visitor, drops a cookie, and redirects to the product’s page.

The easiest way to do all of that is to have a long link. But one affiliate software company got the idea that tracking where users came from and crediting the right affiliate is still possible using a direct, clean SEO link.

Here’s how it’s done.

If you have a Web analytics software for your website, you must have seen the section in the report that points out the Top Referring Sites. Or you may have landed on a website through Google or Twitter and were greeted by Welcome, Googler! or Welcome, Twitter user! How do these sites know where you’re coming from? They use what’s called HTTP referer [sic]. It’s part of the HTTP protocol and it allows the target website to know where it’s being linked from.

Utilizing this technology, 7UP can group and track all visitors that land on 7up.com through msafi.com without me, as the affiliate, having to use a special link.

How to get started with this new affiliate linking method

From my technical background, I realized the potential of this method and I set out to look if someone has built a system that exploits this technology. Sure enough, I found Post Affiliate Pro. It’s the only affiliate software that is capable of this as far as I know.

Here’s what they say on their website about this linking method:

Search Engine Friendly Links

With Post Affiliate Pro, your affiliate links can be SEO friendly. Customize the link format exactly the way you like it; choose from different linking types:

Standard (redirect)

http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate/scripts/t.php?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (URL parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (Anchor links)

http://www.yoursite.com/#a_aid=1&a_bid=2

SEO links (with mod rewrite)

http://www.yoursite.com/1/2.html

DirectLink (no parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/

Post Affiliate Pro’s extraordinary DirectLink technology offers the best possible linking method – your affiliates link to your site without any additional parameters in the URL.

A few things to consider

In very unusual cases, the HTTP referer will not be reported correctly, and this decreases the reliability of this linking method. Also, without a unique link to send visitors to, affiliates couldn’t promote your product or service to their email list or on forums. But that’s not a big problem because, as I just showed above, Post Affiliate Pro allows multiple methods of linking. So, you can ask your affiliates to use the DirectLink from their websites and the other links for emails and whatever else…

Obviously, Post Affiliate Pro is a self hosted affiliate software, which means it doesn’t come ready with an army of affiliates compared to using an affiliate network such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, or Commission Junction. It also requires more in-house work such as paying the affiliates, managing refunds and whatnot.

Getting the best of both worlds

It is possible to have an in-house as well as an outsourced affiliate program. For example, you can have your product listed on ClickBank and at the same time allow some affiliates to link to you using a direct link.

But, why would anyone use your in-house program instead of your network-managed program?

You can convince some of your affiliates to use the SEO links of the in-house program by giving them a higher commission than the ClickBank affiliates.

Additionally, this technology can also work as a performance reward for link partners. Webmasters will be more willing to link to your website when they know they’ll get paid for converting traffic. This can provide a great boost your link building efforts.

What else can you do to get SEO juice from your affiliates?

If you’re not going to use an affiliate software that allows for SEO links, there is something else you could try to get more SEO power from your affiliates.

Basically, give your affiliates JavaScript powered link codes.

Going back to 7UP. If 7UP is like most online merchants, their website would have a section or a page dedicated to affiliates — welcoming them, giving them instructions, ideas, linking tools, and so on. In that section, they can provide HTML code to their affiliates like this:

<a href="http://www.7up.com" onclick="location.href='http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348'; return false;">
Great drink!</a>

In Google’s eyes, this is a direct link to 7up.com. However, when a real human user clicks on this link, the JavaScript-powered browser would actually take the user to the affiliate link that is specified in onclick.

For example, see this link: Google. When you hover over this link, your status bar at the bottom tells you that if you click on this link, you’re going to go to http://www.google.com. But try clicking on it, it’ll actually take you to the homepage of msafi.com.

This is cool and all, but there are a few things to consider. First, supposedly, search engines have become smarter at detecting JavaScript like this. Second, for people who don’t have a JavaScript powered browser (a fractional minority), the affiliate commission will be lost as those users will be taken to the direct link and not the affiliate link.

Dominating the SERPs

None of what’s written here is considered unacceptable black hat practice. Whether you decide to use the Post Affiliate Pro SEO link method or simply provide a JavaScript powered HTML code to your affiliates, you’ll sure see positive results in your ranking.

Alternatively, you can use Post Affiliate Pro direct link as a reward for link partners. It could make it much easier for you to convince and acquire new link partners and affiliates. And therefore, dominate the SERPs.