Are affiliate programs good for seo?

[levalencia1]

We found this website

https://shareasale.com/learnmore.cfm

Actually is an affiliate site, where the users there would be in charge of driving traffic into our website, and then we pay them in some way, I just wanted to know if this can affect my seo efforts negativele?

THanks

[marcinlejman]

Hi,

no, implementing a Shareasale affiliate program should not have any negative impact on your SEO efforts. All affiliate traffic must be channeled through Shareasale redirects, and all affiliates will link to these redirect links.

It means that affiliates will not generate any strange backlinks to your site.

[EGOL]

I just wanted to know if this can affect my seo efforts negativele?

If your website is all about green widgets and you say... "Hey, I'll pay you good money for referring buyers to me!".... there might be quite a few extremely smart people who own strong websites decide to take you up on the deal.  They then add lots of pages about green widgets to their website - absolutely saturating the keyword spectrum - and tomorrow morning when you wake up their pages will all be above yours all over the web. 

Don't underestimate what one affiliate can do.  He could own six powerful websites that are somewhat related to you.  Just adding a page to them about green widgets could be enough to out rank you.  And if he uses all six of those sites you are bumped - overnight - from page one to page two.

So, in addition to "working for you".... affiliates can "compete against you".

I rank above my affiliate program sites for their main keywords.  Do they think its a "negative"?....  I don't think that they like my site above theirs - but at least I am selling their widget and not the other guy's.