SEO value of affiliate external links

[nchachula]

There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link"

I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.

[MattAntonino]

These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.

Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:

Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.

To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.

[SEO-Expert-Danny]

Matt is correct, link as redirect from affiliate site doesn't  pass link juice, but it does count as a link with several other search engines, such as Bing usually do pass. Also I am strong believer in Matt Cutts theory, but he hasn't been part of Google for quite some times, Google is rolling out unnamed algorithms, meaning everything is possible specially if you are finding those links in webmaster search console.

[nchachula]

I am not sure if this is completely true, however I contacted Shareasale about these links. I asked them if I were to close my Shareasale account, they said the link would then just directly go to me. The anchor link is indeed directly pointing to my site. I am not sure how google can read that it is affiliate looking at source code alone?

[MattAntonino]

A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.

So if someone builds a shareasale link like:

Link to your product

This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.

If the link is something like:

Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.

In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."

[nchachula]

The links ARE setup like this Link to your product

I am confused on how it knows to briefly direct to Shareasale. In this source code there is nothing that looks out of place. It looks like a completely normal link except it does contain the verbiage class="external-link" other than that it looks regular. These links are ALSO showing up in webmaster tools as DO FOLLOW.

[Everett]

I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.

Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.

However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.

Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Nicholas,

To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.

In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.

In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

[BradsDeals]

This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:

our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)

Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.

In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.

[BradsDeals]

I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.