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Thanks for the feedback David, that is one that seemed appealing to us ahead of the rest of the pack so glad to hear you've had good experiences with them! Cheers, Chris

Hi Gordian, Which affiliate network are you using like cj, linkshare, shareasale ? They already have affiliate link tracking for sales. Affiliate get paid based upon those affiliate links. Please talk to your affiliate network they will help you out in it.

Interesting question Eric. One of the first things I'd do is write up a professional press release to announce the partnership and post it on your partner's site. This way, you get a nice contextual link from the newspaper. And if your partnership ever goes sour, you'll always have that link. Onto your question: I'd say go simple, like the Simply Hired example. Remember: after the first link, links from the same domain aren't as powerful. So you're goal should be to maximize the partner links for traffic and funneling PR...which a simple image link can do.

Google has trended towards devaluing links between domains with "Administrative Relationships." It's a good bet that they can figure out you own both domains. That said, it's only a devaluation. The links still count - just not as much. Think of it more like internal anchor text from your own site. Like Nakul said, since it's only one domain, you're not going to suffer a "link-wheel" scheme penalty or anything similar. It's natural and normal for sister sites to link to one another - even groups of sister sites. But the links likely won't help as much as external links form outside sites.

Sandip it sounds like you are providing advice for an affiliate. JB85 is asking about affiliate links because he is a merchant. JB85 are you going to go through an affiliate network like Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, Google Affiliate Network.... or are you going to have the links go directly to your site via some internal affiliate management system or script? If you go through a major network you don't have to worry about it. The links go through the network's URL first and do not pass pagerank. If you have the links go directly to your site you should not try to get pagerank through them. Add a rel nofollow tag to the text you provide affilaites, and state that the links must be nofollowed in your terms. It may seem like a good idea to use "naked links" but it would be short-term gain and long-term loss for any eCommerce business hoping to generate organic search revenue in the coming years. Good luck!

If the partner site would allow you to add code to their thank you page, you could have them just add your existing Google Analytics tracking code to that page and then page views of thankyou.html would start showing up in your Google Analytics. The problem with that though is that it will show ALL page views of thankyou.html, not just the page views that originate from referrals from your domain.  So this would only work if you are sending traffic to a page on the partner's site that is exclusive to your domain. You could actually set up a custom report in GA to show only page views of thankyou.html where the referrer is your domain, but you'd have a bunch of additional page views mixed in with your data that have nothing to do with your site.

I know that Amazon shows ads from AdWords since they are considered part of the Google AdWords Search Network (not the Display Network). I haven't used AdWords to advertise on Amazon since late 2011, but I just checked out a Amazon product page and checked out the Sponsored Links. The URLs are being sent through A9.com, but the landing page had the "gclid" parameter appended to the end of the URL which leads me to believe that these are AdWords ads. I had a lot of success advertising on Amazon product pages by offering the product cheaper than Amazon did and including the price in the copy of the ad. For example, a ping pong table was on Amazon for $300 and so I created an ad for the exact same ping pong table and listed it for $279. Even though my site did not have the reputation/credibility of Amazon, shoppers were more than willing to click on the ad to visit a third party site for a better deal. Anyways, that didn't really answer your question, so if you want your ads to show up on Amazon under the Sponsored Links, I suggest setting up an AdWords account and choose the Search Network.

There's no bullet proof hard and fast way to do this, but this is how I approach this problem. I use Google's Keyword tool to give me a base "ballpark" CPC. Then, I calculate what my average profit will be from an average conversion. For example, say my profit from a $100 sale is $50. Say, for example I'm going to count on a 2% conversion rate for my ad, and Google says the average CPC for my term is $2.00. This means that for every $200 in my ad spend (100 clicks) I should get 2 conversions. That would mean I am only breaking even, not really making any profit on the sale at all. That being the case, the only way to be profitable in this case would be to improve my conversion rate significantly and also work to lower my cost per click, perhaps by improving my ad's quality score. You need to determine what your profit goals are from the campaign because this is going to greatly influence your target CPC. If you are using the ad as a customer acquisition tool, it might not be so bad to take a loss on the transaction if you gain a customer for life. One other place to compare CPC costs is in SEMRush. This can give you a ballpark idea of what competitors are paying per click, but as with Google, these are averages based across broad data sets that you can't see, so you really need to take them with a grain of salt. Start with your ballpark figure and your sales goals in hand and tweak the ad and bids until you hit your target. In my experience, this can take as little as a week and as much as 3 months, so you need to have patience. All new campaigns, by sheer virtue that they have no history are going to cost you more money at first. Once your quality score improves and stabilizes, your costs should come down. I hope this helps! Dana

Adding no follow link is great to make sure that your website does not get penalized, how if you are too worried about it, you can create a separate landing page for it and get it blocked via robots.txt file. Here is what google says - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 Note that PPC (pay-per-click) advertising links that don’t pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad do not violate our guidelines. You can prevent PageRank from passing in several ways, such as: Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a></a><a> tag</a> <a>* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file</a> <a></a>

Thank you for the help.  I thought it sounded a bit odd!

_After the penguin update you have to be careful while linking with anchor text. It is now like following a middle path and this is the kind of anchor text policy I would like you to implement - Natural Anchor Text: 25% Click Here More Info Click to Know More Branded Keyword and Long tail keyword 30**%** Example.com web design company in Birmingham Example.com – best web design company in Birmingham_ Example.com Birmingham Related keyword 30% One of the best web design companies in Birmingham Award winning Birmingham based web design company Creative web Design Company in Targeted keyword 15% web design Birmingham

Interesting question there Mozzin, I think it depends on how you are tracking the urls. I think it will also come down to the number of affiliate urls that you have coming in and also whether they are followed or no followed. We tried to change some of these affiliate urls to no-follow and saw a bit of change in rankings following one of the Google updates to do with links. (correlation does not mean causation). As for using iframes maybe you can take a look at this post here on Moz, http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-iframes-for-affiliate-ads

It looks like that post is doing really well. I think SEO5's suggestion is the way to go. I'd be concerned about trying to over-optimize your current post that is already doing so well. You had some great comment activity, good social signals, all-in-all a great win for you. That page will probably continue to improve with time too, since it's a perfect link-bait kind of post. Congrats.

170k visitors in a month = $140 with only 1 banner ad on the whole site you might get better results with more banners

Indeed - I don't expect to make any money but thought it's worth a try. I linked to a DVD in my first post without even thinking about affiliate marketing so I thought I may as well try and make the most of it. If I could eventually make the £5 a year back that my domain name costs I'd be very happy!

1. A unique IP is always a plus, that's true. It's like you travelling with your passport vs. you travelling along with ten other people using the same passport. Besides, on a shared IP address you risk having your site associated with the other sites on the same IP -- which may or may not have questionable content. 2. The template's design doesn't make any difference because there are 1,000 sites using the same template from Themeforest, for example, each from totally different business areas. Host your sites on different hosting accounts and have a second look at the domains' whois data, for starters.

Thanks Oleg and Matt for the really helpful feedback