It is no wonder that Amazon and other giant shopping sites that offer affiliate programs rank highest on search engines like Google. The associate that use the affiliate programs are helping drive those stores link popularity up by using the standard links which in turn hurts their own affiliate marketing strategies. There are easy ways you can implement linking to prevent sabotaging your own SEO.

The Problem

When you create a link that points to a product or the associated program for commission referrals, the search engines follow that link even if it is redirected by a 301 or other means. Even if you try and use Google’s “nofollow” rules the link is still observed as a pointer from your site to theirs. Even using a jump gate and robot.txt rules the search engines will still observe the outgoing link to the destination. When you have thousands of other associates using their own links to point to that same product then OF COURSE that drives the authority of the affiliate programs own page to the top of the search engine listings.

Then of course customers are not going to drill down several pages deep in search engine results to click on your link. That is if you get listed on the search engines at all with such tactics. It is counterintuitive to use such direct links for any type of reseller campaign.

The Solution

First you need to stop using the original manufacturer information supplied by the affiliate program for your affiliate link pages. When search engines see the exact same content on a thousand different pages then you will get very little traction if any. I will cover “content mutation” in a future article.

Addressing the problem with links and link juice pouring out of you page to the affiliate program you must eliminate the ability of the search engine to recognize and follow the actual link while not blocking your own web traffic from channeling through the link.

There are several different approaches that can be used, AJAX, Javascript, CSS Dom to name a few but the easiest is to simply use a POST form. Currently search engines such as Google do not try and press on form buttons and follow them, they are completely ignored, except in the case of simple action GET forms.

<form action="http://MY AFFILIATE LINK" method="POST">
<input type="submit" value="BUY NOW" />
</form>

This is not totally ideal as the link can still be picked up from the action tag, however not all affiliates will have the ability to add a jump gate, but it is better than nothing, it won’t be considered a hole in your page for link juice.

This is not totally ideal as the link can still be picked up from the action tag, however not all affiliates will have the ability to add a jump gate, but it is better than nothing, it won’t be considered a hole in your page for link juice.

A better solution is to use a simple jump gate that masks the URL, such as something like this.

<form action="jump.php" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="id" value="<?php echo base64_encode(http://MY AFFILIATE LINK); ?>" />
<input type="submit" value="BUY NOW" />
</form>

jump.php

<?php
header('Location: '.base64_decode($_REQUEST[id]));
exit;
?>