Affilate Programs on Subdomains

[Katharine]

Hello SEO Community!

We are launching an affiliate program and for CMS flexibility the preferred, development solution, is putting the affiliate program on a subdomain.

Financial incentive affiliate programs "don't pass link value." Lets pretend they do for this situation

Here is the example:

company website= example.com

affilate website= affiliate.example.com

Proposed affilate program:

affilate.example.com/12345 -->301 redirects --> example.com

There are multiple business services so sometimes the 301 redirect looks like this:

affilate.example.com/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-foo

affilate.example.com/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-bar

note: The business services provided are very different. As a result, these links will be placed on very different types of website. To keep contextually relevant links in the 301 redirect should the affiliate look like this?:

affilate.example.com/busines-service-foo/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-foo

affilate.example.com/busines-service-bar/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-bar

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Thanks in advance for your feedback!

If anyone can point me in the direction of an ideal way to set up affiliate programs that would be great.

Especially regarding:

canonical tag, # in url, 301

Any arguments about keeping the the affiliate off a subdomain are also very welcome.

Thanks!

[FedeEinhorn]

As far as I know, a 301 redirect passes pagerank to the final destination, therefore if you get too many bad links it will affect your main domain rankings.

I would suggest you to create javascript tags that your affiliates can use to display banners, and links to your site and adding the nofollow attribute to those links created by the js.

There's a Matt Cutts video where he explains how 301 redirects work:

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw

[Everett]

I like the idea of sending affiliate links through a redirect on a subdomain because you can kill off all of those links at once by removing the redirects so they don't affect the final destination page should you need to clean up your link profile of page-rank-passing affiliate links. Whereas, if you had those links go straight to the destination page you'd have to ask the affiliates to remove each and every link, and/or use the disavow tool on them. I have heard of people sending those though a URL shortening service instead of a subdomain, which should work just as well since they are 301s.

I'm not sure how much sway keywords in the redirecting URL have, but it isn't a bad idea to keep them contextual as you described above. That just seems to make sense anyway.

Since the affiliate.subdomain URL is going to 301 redirect it won't have a canonical tag. You could put a self-referencing canonical tag on the final destination page if you wanted to.

The number in the URL is fine.

This seems like a good topic for discussion so I will leave it open for you.

PS: My answers assume you know the risks of passing pagerank through affiliate links and are willing to take them.