How good are affiliate links ?

I wonder whether people here tried to increase their link pop by running their own affiliate program and to what success?

Ahaaaa, I here you saying: "affiliate links are bad", but hold on. The idea I am having is to run summit that people want to take onto their site (good content, earning prospects, or whatever ...), then to provide them with some snipplet of client-code that takes it in from your own site without letting google notice that we have duplicate content going here (link to a js file, iframe, ...) PLUS ... and that should do the trick ... some "<a href=http://www.mydomain.com>keyword</a> page powered by me" HTML in the snipplet as well. Once there are enough webmasters that take it across to their own live-sites, that would count for real link building, would not it?

I would not even mind training some of these affiliates in basic SEO techniques through my FAQ. Ideally, affiliates need to enrich their pages with keywords in their body text, as they look quite poor because of the js/iframe.

Maybe, a few precautions would be good for my affiliate linkback NOT to say the same bloody thing all the time, but then after that who could tell the difference and not recognise it as a "genuine" link. Google?

What do you think guys?

If you can pull that off and combine both things, seo and affiliate downlines, you can create an empire!

>I would not even mind training some of these affiliates in basic SEO techniques through my FAQ. Ideally, affiliates need to enrich their pages with keywords in their body text, as they look quite poor because of the js/iframe.


I think you'll find most afilliates have a good knowledge of SEO. That's why they join afilliate programs. Quite a few can show you a thing or two, so you don't need to worry about training them. Few are going to work strictly for one entity and most aren't going to jeopardize the whole for a slice. Thats why quite a few make good money.

Interesting that you mention this subject. Our company has spent 1000's of dollars on marketing and both affiliates and ad campains are managed with a system that uses session ID's therefore each time a visitor enter our site from a link of a banner add or a affiliate he will go through the entire site with his own unique session ID. This created a HUGE problem for me in the beginning as I lost out BIG time from an SEO point of view. I then discovered that some of our ad campaigns were running on fairly BIG websites. I started boosting their links and submitted it to the SE's. One of my sites are designed entirely in Flash even the menu (NO sitemap). As far as Google are concerned it has alot of pages. But this iss due to the Unique Session ID's because Google can see only the Index page. But because this particular add campaign is generating over 4000 backlinks this site is ranking #26 for the most competitive keyword we are targetting and all I changed was the Meta and Title of the page.
This proves 2 things. The theory of Authority is deadon and link text of the backlink is king as we know Google doesn't care much for meta tags(does contain the keyword) and the Page Title doesn't contain this keyword only the link text does.

Ach... just go buy some high PR text-ads/links.

Leave affiliate marketers out of your scheme until you're ready to establish partnerships where your primary goal is SALES and you don't care WHO ranks higher in SERPs.