Do Affilates help link popularity?

We will be launching a full blown affilate program starting December 1. Will the affilate link count towards my link popularity?

Please advise!


PS Thanks to everyone on this board who has taken the time to answer my questions. I greatly appreciate it!!

Dan

Women of the World

Yes affiliat links help your links popularity if the link is hardcoded on the the website that is linking to you. However if the link that is pointing to your site has a very long complicated URL then it may not count or it may take longer for the Googlebot to count it.

Thanks a lot jman. I'll try to make sure the links are hardcoded.

The links do not count towards the base PR if you use some sort of tracking ID to determine specific affiliates. For instance website.com?affil_id=123 would be treated as a different page than website.com?affil_id=1234.

If
www.mysite.tld/
www.mysite.tld/?affil_id=1
www.mysite.tld/?affil_id=2
www.mysite.tld/?affil_id=3

all point to the same page then google will apply all the benefits to the page it thinks is the main one and only list it in the index.

If you have very few links pointing to www.mysite.tld it is possible for a clever affiliate to play a trick on you
If the link with the affiliate id gets in the index insted of your main url. Then all your Google traffic will carry the affiliate id and you would have to pay up :-) I did this with a online sex store.
They wasn't all to happy about it.

Requiem -

It's a duplicate content trick that you played; each of the pages are treated as separate pages, with the highest ranking page being the one kept.

Cygnus

There is a program that works well for affiliate link pop that has a unigue tracking method. It's called fusionquest.

Requiem and Cygnus,

What if the affiliate page has slightly different content? Such as replacing the main keyword in the title and body text with a synonym of the same word? Would both pages then appear in the index?

EGOL -

In that case, the pages are still treated as separate, but how many backlinks and PR will these slightly different pages have? That's the key issue.

You could potentially get every affiliate page in the index if the content is different enough, but think about how you will rank.

Cygnus

No, that is only the case if the identical pages are of seperate domains. If there are to urls that point to the same page on a single site googlebot will figure it out.

I have a 18 weeks old site (belongs to me personally) with only a few xeno backlings (DMOZ etc.) pointing to: www.mydomaoin.tld/ the rest of the links are backlinks from myother sites. Last update I captured the #1 for a medium traffic keyword, because of PR change and achor text. I will now change the +200 links pointing from my other sites to:

www.mydomain.tld/?affil_id=1
www.mydomain.tld/?affil_id=2
....
www.mydomain.tld/?affil_id=200 or whatever.

If you are right (and I am wrong) then:
-my ranking will suffer.
-the PR will drop.
-I can safely advice people not to do what I am doing.

Did I understand you correctly Cygnus?

I really don't know. Maybe we could run a test?
It could be educational.

Not quite. Your ranking should be okay, because each of the pages are treated separately (as from your example, they are on the same domain...only the file name is different). The only time your ranking wouldn't be okay is if one of your affiliates was able to get more backlinks and a higher PR for his/her landing page.

PR drop: you should be fine; I've never seen a PR drop for this reason.

As for the advising, I still think it's the easiest way to setup an affiliate program. Bruce Clay uses the http_referrer tag, allowing all links to go to one URL, but it makes it difficult to track multi-level campaigns, etc etc.

I used to think exactly what you proposed when I started my first affiliate program, but Google educated me with the harsh lessons that having several hundred affiliates won't do much for link pop and PR...but the profits are still nice.

Cygnus

Hello Cygnus.

you wrote


...each of the pages are treated as separate pages...


Maybe I am a bit slow today :-) . Could you please explain, since I clearly did misunderstand. Are we infact saying the same thing (if you reread the posts above). If we are then there wouldn't be a need for me to run that test.

I am looking forward to your reply.

I'll use myself as the example:

https://www.personalcashadvance.com...aspx?affil_id=1

is treated as a separate HTML page than

https://www.personalcashadvance.com...aspx?affil_id=2

Thus, backlinks to these two pages do not benefit the root page https://www.personalcashadvance.com/Personal/apply.aspx

The final kicker, that you mentioned far above, is that because of the duplicate content, only the higher PR page will show. In my case, I made sure that this is the root page.

The only test worth doing is what EGOL suggested, making the content slightly different on each page (perhaps showing affiliate name, location, etc). Or, do what Bruce Clay does with the http_referrer tag and drop the dynamics.

Cygnus

There are many opinions about anchor text, (the words that a viewer clicks on to activate the link), however, I still think it has importance in page rank. The anchor text when possible, should be a keyword related to Your site. Some affiliates like to use Click Here or Request Free.... but it's most beneficial for you with regards to PR and link popularity if the anchor text is formatted correctly. If you are more concerned about generating leads or sales, you may want to use more salesly click text.