How to prevent affiliates from bringing negative SEO?

[freeunlocks]

Hi there,

I'm just about to integrate iDevAffiliate network for one of my sites, however it occurred to me that affiliates may (unfortunately) resort to black hat methods without me becoming aware of it, which could pass negative link juice to my site.

Is there any way to use affiliate networks such as iDev without causing this problem? I was thinking of simply using a different URL, but the problem is that 301 redirects won't mitigate the issue.

Thanks!

[WesleySmits]

As long as the affiliate links are 'nofollow' there won't be any problems for you.

[Raydon]

also ensure they dont steal your content and create duplicate content issues for you.

[Everett]

In the iDevAffilliate control panel you should be able to set the "default incoming traffic" URL and the "alternate incoming traffic" URLs to whatever you want. This would be a good opportunity to set up your affiliate program so ALL affiliate links go through a redirect on another domain or subdomain. For instance, a premium URL shortening service or a redirect script on another domain you own, or even one installed on a subdomain for that site.

This way 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. 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. To put it another way...

If spammy affiliate #123 links to www.YourSite.com/Product?affiliate-id=123 you would have to either get them to take the link down or use the Google Webmaster Central "disavow" tool (which is spotty, at best). Multiply this by hundreds or thousands of affiliates and it becomes a royal pain.

However, if spammy affiliate #123  links to http://adsever.yoursite.com/link-id=1 or www.URLShorten.er/asdf, which then redirects to www.YourSite.com/Product then you can simply remove the redirect on your end without ever having to deal with the affiliate, who will then be linking to a 404 page on a different domain, which is of little concern to you.

[freeunlocks]

Thank you for that suggestion. But the problem is that I might not detect/be able to monitor the issue across thousands of links.

What do you think about using 302 redirects? Is there any problem with that?

Should I just get my affiliates to use nofollow tags when linking to the main site?

Too many options! Thanks for your help.

[WesleySmits]

302's are for temporary redirects.
I would not recommend using them for your situation.

[Everett]

You can give the affiliates code with nofollow in there but if they remove it you have no control over that. However, 99.99% of the time they'll leave it in there. Affiliates don't want to help you outrank them anyway.

As Wesley said above, have them use rel nofollow on the links and you should be fine.