Affiliate Banner File Names?

[OsideRida06]

Hello,

I have this certain website. Is has an affiliate/referral system. Within this system I am adding affiliate banners for our members to use in order to promote the site. They are also getting paid for each referral of course. There is a little box where they can copy and paste the code and it contains the image and a link to the home page with their referral ID.

So my question is, should I make these file names keyword rich? I am wondering if that would have any kind of SEO impact when they are linking to my website? Does it matter about the file name and ALT tag when it is on their website, but pointing to mine? Or will that only help their website? If it will not have any effect at all then I will just use the basic 300x300 type file name for them.

Thanks in advance, 
Gary Darling III

[Gijsbert]

the effect would probably be minimal

[Everett]

Hello Gary,

You should know that using followable affiliate links is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines, as they are viewed as paid links due to the monetary relationship between merchant and affiliate.

With that said, lots of people take the chance anyway and so long as you're aware of the risk...

I do think the alt attribute text contained within an image link (as well as the title attribute in the link) is considered by Google's algorithms. It probably would make a very small difference. However, I would not overdo it by stuffing either the file name or the alt text with lots of keywords. Your brand name, or the name of a product or service would probably be OK, but highly-targeted, non-brand alt text in banner ads that link to your site, especially since a lot of banner ads are site-wide placements (i.e. potentially thousands of pages on a single domain) are not a good idea.

If it were me I would include a nofollow tag in order to avoid any potential link-based penalties in the future, in which case you needn't worry about alt attributes or filenames beyond making them useful to the visitor.