Affiliate links

[PeterM22]

I have a wordpress blog and was wondering the best seo practice for doing affiliate link redirects?

Peter

[SEOCharlie]

Hi Peter; my best shot is: focus on your blog´s content and not your affiliate links. Wordpress is a great tool to do that!

Once you have great contents, people will start to back-link to you

[bendyman]

I'd have to agree with this - content is king for attracting back links.   8 )

[PeterM22]

sorry there seems to be some confusion. I don't mean backlinks, I mean affiliate links... like www.affiliateprogram.com/userid?peterm22

[Everett]

Hello Peter,

Best practice is to avoid looking like a thin affiliate site. That means making the content very useful and unique, obviously, but also linking out via non-affiliate links to other resources as well. In situations where you have several followable links going out to high-quality, trustworthy sites about the topic I have not found it necessary to hide or redirect affiliate links. I used to advise putting the js that controlled the redirect into an external .js file within a /script folder and then blocking that folder, but have found that Google still executes the javascript (they have to or they wouldn't be able to navigate half the sites out there) even if the file is blocked.

However, if your site is mostly affiliate links (like a review site) and you don't feel comfortable with, or don't have time, to link out to trusted resources and create unique, useful content that provides a lot of value, then I would recommend going ahead and using some type of redirect script. In my opinion you'd be better off going with an ad management tool of some sort over an known affiliate redirect script or plugin, which may raise a red flag right away.

Long story short: There is nothing wrong with sending links through a redirect first if you want to track the clicks and other metrics. I just wouldn't use a tool called "affiliate cloaking script" or something like that.

Good luck.

[Memoz]

Was just about to ask the same question