301 or 302 Redirects for Affiliate Links?

6 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hello!

I've been reading a mix of articles about redirects and I still don't know what is going to work best. Many articles say to use a 301, but others say a 302 is best so you don't give link juice to your advertiser.

So what I have is a blog with affiliate links. The links are internal and I'm using a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file. On my blog I am using my site: http://mysite.com/widgets.html (with rel="nofollow") and it works fine.

(ie)
# Redirects
redirect 301 /widgets.html http://money.widgets.com/idevaffiliate.php?id=1791
redirect 301 /screws.html http://money.screws.com/idevaffiliate.php?id=12861

In my BING webmaster tools the crawl information shows that I have 23 "301's". Not sure if that is bad? Should I be using 302 instead?

Google does not like affiliate links at all, so I'm trying to find the best way to still have some links but not have my site demoted because of them, nor pass any site PR to anywhere else.

Suggestions?
THANKS!
#301 #302 #affiliate #links #redirects
  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Do you know what a 301 or 302 is actually for?

    Do you know what nofollow is used for?

    The whole idea of using nofollow, 301, 302 because google
    "hates" affiliate links is just bonkers.

    Paul
    Signature

    If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9596342].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author gusto3000
    Yes Paul, it redirects to another URL. 302 is a temporary move which from what I understand does not give any 'link juice' to the landing url.

    As for Google not liking affiliate links, where have you been??! lol! Its a known fact all over the net.
    How to Get a Google Penalty Using Affiliate Links (And How to Recover) | Niche Pursuits
    https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...lty-18022.html

    It was one of the reasons why they closed GAN (Google Affiliate Network). If they didn't close GAN they would not have been able to take such actions. They wanted to clean their indexes by lowering sites with affiliate links and could not do so while allowing GAN links.

    I noticed the change in the index location once GAN was canned. With the Google Tools I started to get notices about "thin content" on sites that have been around for 8+ years without any issues while serving datafeeds from Commission Junction & Amazon. And while I do have other content on my sites, they are a storefront with many items...and many links. They are nofollow. But still, Google seems to know they are affiliate links. Started using redirects with the .htaccess and the 301 rule and it helped (a little). But I wonder if I should be using 302 redirects? Since this involves the search engines & optimizations I thought this was the right place to post.

    Now I came here asking for some help Paul, not to be ridiculed or belittled over a question. As you can see from the articles, its not "BONKERS". Maybe you know more than me, but perhaps that is the reason why I'm here asking the "experts" for help.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9596643].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
      Originally Posted by gusto3000 View Post

      Yes Paul, it redirects to another URL. 302 is a temporary move which from what I understand does not give any 'link juice' to the landing url.

      As for Google not liking affiliate links, where have you been??! lol! Its a known fact all over the net.
      How to Get a Google Penalty Using Affiliate Links (And How to Recover) | Niche Pursuits
      https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...lty-18022.html

      It was one of the reasons why they closed GAN (Google Affiliate Network). If they didn't close GAN they would not have been able to take such actions. They wanted to clean their indexes by lowering sites with affiliate links and could not do so while allowing GAN links.

      I noticed the change in the index location once GAN was canned. With the Google Tools I started to get notices about "thin content" on sites that have been around for 8+ years without any issues while serving datafeeds from Commission Junction & Amazon. And while I do have other content on my sites, they are a storefront with many items...and many links. They are nofollow. But still, Google seems to know they are affiliate links. Started using redirects with the .htaccess and the 301 rule and it helped (a little). But I wonder if I should be using 302 redirects? Since this involves the search engines & optimizations I thought this was the right place to post.

      Now I came here asking for some help Paul, not to be ridiculed or belittled over a question. As you can see from the articles, its not "BONKERS". Maybe you know more than me, but perhaps that is the reason why I'm here asking the "experts" for help.
      I think you misunderstood what paulgl said. What he means is that whether you use a 301 or 302 or nofollow tags, it won't stop Google from finding your affiliate links and taking action against your site. Therefore, it's pointless to redirect or nofollow them. Just link directly to your affiliate offers.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9596681].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    What are you trying to achieve?

    Is it hide the links from Google, if so 301, 302, nofollow doesn't hide them.

    If you are trying to prevent SEO benefit passing 301 and 302 doesn't work, they both pass SEO value. Nofollow doesn't pass link benefit to the affiliate, but the PR that would flow through the link is lost.

    I use an advanced CSS/javascript technique for affiliate links described at Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial it's built into the SEO theme I develop, though nothing stopping anyone acquiring my links.js file and using it with their site.

    David
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9597290].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Here's what I do for affiliate links...

    I build 1 self hosted webpage on my domain that's a custom sales page for whatever product I'm selling. Anywhere on all my same niche domains that mentions that specific product has a link pointing at my custom self hosted sales page. That way I only have a single affiliate link on the entire domain or even a series of same niche domains. For me I link directly to checkout pages on the vendor domain which is always noindexed so Google is obviously going to see that nobody cares about ranking a checkout page.

    Do not use a 301/302 redirect, If anything use a nofollow, or even a complicated javascript link so Google will see your not trying to boost the rank on a vendor domain/page.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9597394].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author gusto3000
    Thanks guys! Maybe I did misunderstand Paul...I apologize, it was like 3am and I was frustrated and tired.

    I'm actually using both the nofollow and a redirect. So instead of an affiliate link, I use a link that I created in the .htaccess My site being widgets.com I would use:
    a href="widgets.com/product1.html" rel="nofollow"

    Given that, Google should not follow the link, correct?

    Then the backend of that link is processed by the htaccess which actually ports the shopper to the affiliate program to hopefully buy something.
    redirect 301 /product1.html http://money.affiliatesite.com/ideva...te.php?id=1791

    The problem is Google and Bing still seem to be following the 'nofollow' because it shows in the webmaster tools history as a redirect.

    That being the case, I was wondering if a 302 direct would be better versus a 301 as I don't want to pass PR. Or as a couple of you suggested, don't even bother with a redirect and only use nofollow on the real affiliate link.

    Another reason why I use the redirect is because its very easy to manage. If I have that link 10 places across my entire site and the affiliate program changes, or I want to direct those shoppers to a different page on the AF site, I can simply change the redirect.

    But either way my search engine position is terrible. I used to be on page #1, position 1-3 and now I'm buried on PAGE 200+ of the results for the same exact term. I know there are many factors involved, but this all started when GAN was shutdown and Google started to focus on affiliate websites.

    I know this for fact because I have several sites and they all took a hit about the same time.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9597931].message }}

Trending Topics