Affiliate & canonicals

[Richard555]

Hi, any help with this one would be great....

www.example.com sells widgets online. They are also promoted on a 3rd party website www.partner.com.

Currently www.partner.com links to a page on www.example.com that is completely branded with the 'partners' design, style and unique copy (you would think you were still on 'partner' website).

I saw this interesting article from 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links (in particular idea 1)

Do you think adding a rel=canonical on www.example.com's partner page is still safe?

All the best & thank you,

Richard

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Richard,

Absolutely, in the case you mentioned within the article it was a duplicate page of their normal pro page. So adding a canonical tag with the URL of the original page was by far the best way to make clear for Google that the original version of the page could be found elsewhere.

Hope this helps!

[Richard555]

Many thanks Martijn, your help is much appreciated.

All the best

Richard

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, I think that's relatively safe, although it depends a bit on the scope relative to your overall site index and link profile (I wouldn't set up 500 affiliate URLs with a canonical on a site that only had 600 indexed URLs and a few dozen non-affiliate links). Keep in mind that Google may still choose to devalue the affiliate link, but the canonical tag will keep these landing pages from looking like duplicates and should prevent anything harsher.

[Richard555]

Thank you Peter, very clear information

All the best!

Richard