Affiliate Programs that pass SEO weight

affiliateprograms — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:15:54 +0000

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.

Multi-tiered affiliate programs or sub-affiliates

affiliateprograms — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 07:36:23 +0000

There are many people in the affiliate industry that consider multi-tier affiliate programs to be a negative thing for the affiliate community. The negative association appears (from what I have seen) to be linked with issues regard pyramid scheme style programs. This can often lead to affiliate programs who have no relationship to these types of schemes being labelled as un-trustworthy, merely because they allow sub-affiliates to exist.

The ability to promote to other affiliates about a specific affiliate program and receive a commission for bringing that affiliate into the program, to myself, is a natural occurance. Why would an affiliate program not want new affiliates and why would the promoter not deserve a cut? It is the reason for affiliate programs.

Regardless of your stance on this, most affiliate programs that I have come across globally allow promotion to sub-affiliates although the revenue to the promoter is not usually very high as the margins are cut back significantly for the affiliate program when more than one person is involved. The key here is for the program to be very up-front with any joining affiliate when they have signed up through another affiliate’s tracking link.

Interestingly, in New Zealand affiliate programs, I have yet to find a program that allows for sub-affiliates and the promotion of the affiliate itself. I am unsure if this is a techincal issue, as many New Zealand affiliate progams are developed in-house and are therefore not as technically advanced as other larger programs, or if this is a larger issue with the New Zealand affiliate market believing there are problems with multi-tiered affiliate programs.

As I research further into the New Zealand market and the programs available we will see.

New Zealand Affiliate Programs » affiliate program structure

Affiliate Programs that pass SEO weight

Multi-tiered affiliate programs or sub-affiliates