Which affiliate programs pass the best SEO value through their links?

[menachemp]

How good is Google at detecting the affiliate nature of those links?  How does this rate as a linkbuilding strategy?

[Everett]

Hello Menachemp,

Google is really good at detecting affiliate links, especially from any known network. To answer your question in the title, the best SEO value would come from a home-grown affiliate program that doesn't use any of the link footprints or networks that others are using.

In terms of a linkbuilding strategy you'd be paying for links so essentially it could get your entire domain in hot water. Getting random affiliates to remove all of those links after the fact would be a nightmare. So unless you are ok with the very real possibility that you'll have to scrap the domain and start over again somewhere else I'd stay away from it as a linkbuilding strategy.

Some people run those links through another domain first and then 301 them to the destination. That way if Google figures out what you're doing you can just dissconnect the redirects and remove all of those links with the flip of a switch in the middle-domains' htaccess file. Google knows about this tactic as well, and I would be very surprised if they haven't addressed it already, or very soon.

This isn't a whitehat / blackhat or a moral thing for me. It is a matter of risk tolerance. In this case the pay-off would have to be big and fast for me to have enough risk tolerance to chance burning a legitimate business down. People have been trying this tactic for at least five years (that's about the time when I first thought of it myself, though I'm sure others were doing it long before that) so this is nothing new, especially to Google. Keep that in mind when planning it out, and get someone to build it for you from scratch if you're going to do it.

Good luck!