Redirect Affiliate links and preserve page rank at the same time.

5 replies
  • SEO
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Hi there. I want your thoughts on this.

Here's the problem:

Every time you link to an affiliate product, you send link juice to that page. You want to link to the affiliate page, so users can go there, but you don't want googlebot to see that and give link juice to someone else's page when you could save it for one of your pages.

A possible solution:

Link to a script that redirects regular users to the affiliate page, and googlebot back to one of your own pages via a 301 redirect. The result being that users go where you want them to, but google gives link juice to one of your own pages.

Complications:

One easy way to do this is with a user agent match. But a problem is that googlebots masquerade as regular browsers to make sure you aren't cloaking pages. I don't know if this would be detected as page cloaking or not.

Another way to do this might be to use the referrer tag. Anyone coming in to the link from your website would go to the affiliate link, but everyone else would be redirected to one of your other pages (your homepage, perhaps).

I believe googlebot tends to use a static referrer that identifies it as googlebot, but if that changes, then googlebot would be redirected to your affiliate link along with other users.

Anyway, just wanted to get your thoughts on this. Is it possible to do something like this safely?
#affiliate #cloaking #links #page #pagerank #preserve #rank #redirect #time
  • Profile picture of the author MarlboroMonkey
    Assuming everyone's favorite affiliate platform here, Wordpress, I use the Pretty Link Lite plugin which allows you to NoFollow your cloaked affiliate links. Works like a champ and "link juice" preserved (pun!)

    Also, Google doesn't like you sending traffic one way and it's bot a different for "hiding" purposes, which is kind of what you're doing. Just NoFollow it and be done with it is my advice.
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    • Profile picture of the author eshapard
      Originally Posted by MarlboroMonkey View Post

      Assuming everyone's favorite affiliate platform here, Wordpress, I use the Pretty Link Lite plugin which allows you to NoFollow your cloaked affiliate links. Works like a champ and "link juice" preserved (pun!)

      Also, Google doesn't like you sending traffic one way and it's bot a different for "hiding" purposes, which is kind of what you're doing. Just NoFollow it and be done with it is my advice.
      nofollow links haven't preserved linkjuice since about 2009 when google changed the way the handle nofollow links.

      Nowadays, nofollow links still take juice out of your pages, they just don't send it anywhere.

      changing the redirect based on referrer would not necessarily change what googlebot sees when it's cloaked. changing the redirect based on useragent would, but there are valid reasons to redirect based on referrer. For example, you might have pages that you don't want people to get to if they come from a search engine. You might also have pages or files that you don't want other people linking to.
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  • Profile picture of the author YasirYar
    I wouldn't try this because it looks like black hat seo to Google and could get you dinged or even banned.
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  • Profile picture of the author ellios
    I agree with YasirYar, you're showing one thing to googlebot and something completely different to everyone else. It's not good practise and probably end you up in a hot pot of seop!
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