Search Engine Friendly Affiliate Schemes

One problem we come across regularly is the effect of affiliate schemes on search engine optimisation. There are a range of ways to track the number of visitors an affiliate site refers, they all have a varying effect of search engine rankings. Some have a negative effect, others have no effect, we are here to tell you how to make affiliate schemes have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. But first here’s how not to do it:

A common way is to have the affiliate id contained within the URL as a dynamic parameter. This example (http://www.merchantsite.com/?affid=1234) is a straight through link with no redirection. This means that Google & other search engines will place this page in their index, this would cause several copies of the homepage to be indexed by search engines and result in major duplicate content issues. In some extreme cases these affiliate pages have replaced the home page of the merchant site, meaning that the merchants were paying for visitors coming through naturally on their brand name.

A second and most common way is to have an affiliate page that records the visit and then redirects the visitor to the homepage. (http://www.merchantsite.com/redirect.php?affid=1234) This will have no effect on search engine results but means that there is a lot of link juice going to waste. The redirect being used in this case is most commonly a 302 (temporary) redirect, these will mean that the effect of the link will not be passed on. Changing the redirect to a 301 (permanent) redirect will pass on the link value in some search engines, but the more intelligent ones will be able to figure out the parameter at the end of the URL (?affid=1234) is related to some form of affiliate scheme and discount the weight of the links.

The way to make your affiliate scheme have a positive impact on your search results evolves using a URL that does not have a dynamic parameter and combining this with a 301 redirect. So instead of using http://www.merchantsite.com/redirect.php?affid=1234 as the page to refer visitors to, each affiliate has their own folder to point to i.e. (http://www.merchantsite.com/welcome/1234). This folder then contains a page that will record the hit and 301 redirect onto the homepage. To search engines this looks like a normal link and the 301 redirect ensures that all the links pointing to this page are credited to the homepage.