Affiliate Programs that pass SEO weight

Posted on December 27, 2009 
Filed Under Affiliate Software, Affiliate Management

I’ve had some spare time while out of the office and have been reading a couple of interesting posts on work people have completed surrounding building affiliate programs that pass SEO weight.

As you’ll most likely know, affiliate programs are all about gaining advertisements (or links) from other websites through to your own to promote your product.

What you may not have considered is what affect this could have on the SEO for a company if the affiliate program is designed in such a way that all of the in-bound links to the website being promoted are also passing SEO weight.

As a side note, generally Google frowns on allowing advertising from one website to another to pass page rank (if you don’t know what that is, have a read about page rank although if you’re reading this I’m sure you do).

Here’s one post from 3DogMedia from some time ago that describes it quite well. Basically, if you give affiliates static URL’s that they can promote your product through (e.g. http://yoursite.com/affiliateid/) then they’re linking directly to your site on a link that Google can track and pass SEO weight for.

There’s also a post from Stephan Spencer around that describes this with the focus covering the need to make sure that the links used are also 301’s (permanent redirects) so that the search engines know the weight should pass to the resulting page (e.g. the homepage).

Overall the above posts cover some good advice if you’re looking at running your own affiliate program and have the ability to select the URL structure that the program runs on. It’ll help pass SEO weight to your site and is a more user-friendly structure anyway.

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Google Ad Manager could change the affiliate industry ..

Posted on March 18, 2008 
Filed Under Affiliate Resources, General Internet

If you hadn’t heard that Google recently bought DoubleClick (still seeking commission appovals) then you must have been hiding under a rock for the past six months.

The question when they did this was what were they going to do with it?

Late last year I spoke with the Australian DoubleClick sales rep who essentially said they believed it would be business as usual.

It looks like Google have now shown exactly why they bought DoubleClick and it follows their new standard practice. Buy up a big company where small businesses can’t afford their services, roll a limited version of their services out for free to the small business, drop the price to enterprises and bring on ten times the number of enterprises thereby effectively becoming the default provider in the market.

This is what Google Ad Manager looks like it could achieve.

From an affiliate perspective, the constant complaint (or frustration for affiliate managers) is that affiliates just don’t have sophisticated systems for optimising advertising placements across their site. This has always been the area of enterprise level websites only.

Google Ad Manager has just launched its website as “Invitation Only” with a basic tour of what the package will be when it’s available.

It’s every affiliate’s dream.

A simple system the affiliate (or any publisher) can roll out on a new site to start serving adverts, optimising adverts and pulling them up and down based on timing and impressions.

To date the only options have been to do some basic HTML, use a system that an affiliate program has built just for themselves or go the whole way and install an open-source version of an ad server (like OpenAds). None of these provided an easy, quick or intelligent solution across multiple sites with many banner spots.

Check out the new Google Ad Manager yourself. Hopefully it’ll be available for more publishers soon.

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