Affiliate URLs - 301's vs 302's

[Head SEO Bull]

Hi,

I'm struggling to find reasonable advice on the following anywhere.
A client of our has affiliates which currently 302 through a cgi-bin where they are cookied. Looks something like this
http://xxxxx.com/cgi-bin/redir.cgi?aff_id

First of all I assume that a 302 is bad, but most affiliates that I have checked out use them. Is there a reason for this?

Then, assuming I want to convert the tracking to rather return a 301, would/ should I use mod_rewrite or just do the 301 via the .htaccess file.
What is better for ranking and can one cookie and track accurately in both cases?

Also, in terms of the affiliate strategy, should one 301 all of them to the home page of the site, or to various themed pages.

Will 301'ing the affiliates links boost the main site's authority if done correctly?

What's your opinion on 301's vs 302's with affiliates?

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hi Head SEO Bull,

Sorry this is one question, I just can't answer. Not very technical about 301 and 2's. I also am very reluctant to mess with tracking codes. You need to be really careful and do some test purchases to be sure the tracking still works after you do whatever you do. I think Marcia and some other members know something about this. Hopefully they can help. I will see what I can find on the web for you.

Linda

[Jill Whalen]

First of all I assume that a 302 is bad, but most affiliates that I have checked out use them. Is there a reason for this?

302s aren't "bad" they just don't pass any link popularity like a 301 can in Google.

Then, assuming I want to convert the tracking to rather return a 301, would/ should I use mod_rewrite or just do the 301 via the .htaccess file.

As far as I know it's all the same as long as it gives off a 301 http header response.

[Marcia]

I just did an HTTP header check on some affiliate links that are run through the tracking at one of the networks, and it's a 302. No problems at all with that network, as long as the traffic and orders track (which they do). That particular network is about the most trustworthy and ethical around in the business.

No problem NOW with the 302's on the links - but there were some *very* serious problems for a while, until just recently. Those URLs themselves that were being redirected with 302s were showing up in the SERPs at one of the engines instead of the page the links were on - so the stats had to be skewed, even though the referrer ID was in the referral - but without a click from the affiliate's page, it was directly from the SERPs.

I sent several examples to the engine over a period of several weeks (OK, I was nagging LOL) - but am not seeing it any more so it looks like whatever the bug was has been corrected.

The 302 isn't an issue unless it's messing up which page is getting ranked in the SERPs. It has been reported that the merchant's URL with the affiliate ID in the URL got indexed instead of the merchant site as it "normally" is without - so that was a serious problem, and it was caused by 302's which can do some strange things sometimes.

If the SERPs are OK and the tracking is working, it's probably OK. Affiliate links are not supposed to pass link popularity, that's not the purpose. They're just supposed to send qualified traffic.

[Head SEO Bull]

First of all thanks for the replies.
My real question hasn't do to with indexing of the affiliate URLs or tracking, but more with link popularity. Marcia says here that the purpose of the affiliate link is to make sales and drive traffic, but not boost the my sites popularity. I would tend to disagree, as any affiliate bears testimony (hopefully) to your product and business. The strongest affiliates should be the ones which have the most authority for me, especially if they are affiliated to multiple businesses. I'm not talking about run-of-site affiliate links here, but specific testimonies to my product/ service. So affiliates which make recommendations based and link from actual reviews etc about my product.

What I'd like to do is get high QUALITY affiliate sites, which will actually benefit my pages and my content.
My thoughts are that if I employ 301's over 302's I can theoretically control what bears testimony on the affiliate pages, to what is being said on my site. So I can optimise the redirects/ mod_rewrites and control what links where.

Then, if this works, I can boost the authority of certain pages or redirect the testimony to an even more focused page.
All this obviously revolves around myself being able to monitor the affiliates and issue them with URLs in advance which they can employ in specific pages.

Then on the 302 = evil issue, I've seen two types of 302's . Is there a technical difference between a 302 that returns a html document with some text saying the page has move and an href containing the link to the final page, and one that just return empty line return (LRs) and carriage returns (CRs) . Are they treated differently by the search engines?
Some 302's return the one, some the other. Any ideas on this. Maybe these two different types of 302's caused those affiliate URL ranking problems.

[Marcia]

So you want linkpop from the affiliate links, then? OK - have a read here, especially the posts by Drastic. The issue was covered in depth

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/...ead.php?t=7114

What I'd like to do is get high QUALITY affiliate sites, which will actually benefit my pages and my content.

Affiliates are generally looking for high quality merchants who will convert their clicks into sales, which will benefit them by paying healthy commissions for the effort it takes for them to send the merchant traffic.

[Head SEO Bull]

I will be harder and harder for affiliates to send traffic in future, if they are seen as affiliates (run of site links). Both human visitors and search engines are bound to start filtering out redirected URLs which pass through other domains.
My premise is that as people and SEs get savvier they will trust affiliate links less. They will only trust real, direct links to the site coming from real content.

Affiliates will thus need to start writing better/ proper content which should rank in its own right. I want my affiliate links embedded in that relevant content, not run-of-site links. Sometimes I might even supply affiliates with content free of charge to boost their content and our (yes our) PR as part of our affiliate program.
The promotion or marketing aspect in a joint one, a win-win situation. But if I as the merchant develop my brand, I should at least get part of the linkpop. It's the same offline. Any retailer is an asset to the brand by marketing it.

The question is just how to manage this on a technical level and whether my current 302's are not doing me any favours at the moment.

[Jill Whalen]

That's quite the scheme you're planning there!

301's will probably eventually provide some link pop. However, since you're actually "voting" for the sites you want to return link pop to you, instead of them voting for you as it is supposed to be, it seems to me that you're just asking for trouble (eventually) by the engines.

Good luck with it.

[Head SEO Bull]

Originally Posted by Jill Whalen

That's quite the scheme you're planning there!

301's will probably eventually provide some link pop. However, since you're actually "voting" for the sites you want to return link pop to you, instead of them voting for you as it is supposed to be, it seems to me that you're just asking for trouble (eventually) by the engines.

Good luck with it.

No, I hope I haven't cluttered the issue. Sorry, I tend to be a bit verbose.
I might be supplying the affiliates with content to link to me and trackable link to my domain (http://mydomain/mypage/affid/ ) which gives returns a 301 and not a 302. But I would really link back to them.
How can that get me into trouble? It's a link on my domain which the affiliates use, looks like a normal link to the search engines and merely says the page has moved.
It's just a bit evil since I have control over where the link points by 301'ing or mod_rewriting it, and perhaps because the page didn't exist in that location to begin with.

Do search engines distinguish between a fake 301 like this and a real one where the page has really existed before ?

Obviously the affiliates will have to trust us on the tracking as it's done on our server side, but that's been discussed elsewhere.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

I'm totally with Marcia and Drastic on this. It sounds like you only want affiliates to boost your PR. Smart affiliates know better. They are in business to make money by getting paid by sale, lead or click. Why would they send traffic to you to help build your brand and PR when they could send traffic elsewhere and earn income for their efforts.

Affiliates will thus need to start writing better/ proper content which should rank in its own right. I want my affiliate links embedded in that relevant content, not run-of-site links.

That's what good affiliates do already. The good affiliates are the ones you want but they want to be paid for their efforts. The way to get good affiliates is to think more about what's in it for them, not what's in it for you.

Linda

[Marcia]

>>What I'd like to do is get high QUALITY affiliate sites, which will actually benefit my pages and my content.

>>I want my affiliate links embedded in that relevant content, not run-of-site links.

That is beyond the scope of how affiliate marketing works, which is performance based marketing based on a percentage basis.

If this is what you want, links to benefit YOUR pages and rankings, then make contact with specific QUALITY affiliates individually and offer to PAY THEM for direct links to you imbedded in quality content.

Obviously the affiliates will have to trust us on the tracking

Affiliates are not fools, they are business people.

[Head SEO Bull]

Hi

I seem to have opened a whole can of worms here, unintentionally. And all this from the 302 vs 301 question!
http://www.webguerrilla.com/affiliat...liate-systems/
http://seoblackhat.com/2005/11/22/se...url-structure/

But I pretty much stand by what I have said. And I'm not the first one to have suggested this by any means and others are using it. I'm also no affiliate, just an SEO looking at some affiliate software and noticing the differences.

So here's my take on it:
Ultimately affiliates do help build a brand, but they are rewarded for their efforts through commission, based on performance. For me this is like retailers all having a big brand in their store, say a washing machine. They all sell it. They all promote it, in slightly different ways. The selling point though is the brand and the respect that the brand carries. That's why I buy my brand of washing machine and why retailers exist, to make me aware of the brand.
The bigger the store the less likely they are to use guerilla tactics for their promotions, right? And the bigger the brand the less guerilla tactics are needed to promote it. Affiliates can be either, big bulky sites with run-of-site links hoping to capture some traffic. Or they can be guerilla style operations helping smaller brands (or large brands) to get known who might make just as much money as the big guys by capturing more focused, word-of-mouth traffic.
Search engines view run-of-site links as paid advertisements. So they'll view "/redirect.php?affid" as paid as well is my guess.
301 affiliate links seem to be guerilla style tactics at the moment in this area, used by some, dispised by others.. affiliate marketers are clearly divided on this.
The real problem is 301's are also used universally for redirecting, which will make it very difficult for search engines in the future to distinguish links. But they are probably working on solving that already.

[littleman]

Some time ago I wrote a small custom aff tracker that worked on referer to credit affiliates. This way we could dump links right to the index page without any redirect. It worked well for the most part, I am sure some data was lost but the pay-out was higher than average so we still had signups.

[Marcia]

we could dump links right to the index page without any redirect

littleman, for the average affiliate site that's partnered with a merchant who has a variety of consumer products, flat out links to the homepage are the worst kind - they aren't targeted and they don't convert. That's why affiliate managers provide individual product linking and datafeeds as tools in order to compete for quality affiliates. Most also provide special links for specials, some weekly, some monthly, some seasonal.

affiliate marketers are clearly divided on this

No, affiliates want to get paid for the traffic they send and they want reliable tracking, and they want merchants they can trust; there's 100% agreement on that.

If you're comparing casino affiliates with the rest, well - you can't. That's an entirely different scene with a completely different mentality, and different "promotional" methods are used.

[Marcia]

Quite frankly, I don't even know what this thread is doing in the Affiliate Marketing forum - it's got absolutely nothing to do with affiliate marketing, which is a business partenership.

If someone wants to use affiliate links to game the engines, that's their privilege and their own business, good luck to them. But what's it got to do with attracting quality affiliate partners, establishing business relationships, getting qualified affiliate referral traffic, and converting to sales?

imho - nothing at all. imho this is off-topic and deceptive.

[Head SEO Bull]

Originally Posted by Marcia

Quite frankly, I don't even know what this thread is doing in the Affiliate Marketing forum - it's got absolutely nothing to do with affiliate marketing, which is a business partenership.

If someone wants to use affiliate links to game the engines, that's their privilege and their own business, good luck to them. But what's it got to do with attracting quality affiliate partners, establishing business relationships, getting qualified affiliate referral traffic, and converting to sales?

imho - nothing at all. imho this is off-topic and deceptive.

I posted my original question in this forum because I thought it's the most relevant one to do so. I'm an SEO, interested in getting relevant, related links whether they be direct or indirect ones. I'm also interested in how links are being perceived by search engines and possible indexing problems sprouting from this. Now and in the future. So I don't want to make uninformed recommendations.
Affiliate links are links to my clients site, after all. My job is it do anything that doesn't hurt my clients business but improves it by getting more organic traffic to relevant pages. If affiliates bring in his revenue and he/she is dependent on it, I must understand that I can't meddle with that. That's why it's potentially an "affiliate issue".

This thread has answered some of my questions and has hopefully created awareness for affiliates as well on the whole 301 vs 302 issue.
Perhaps there are affiliates out there who have been burnt by these SEO friendly links? It would be interesting to hear what industries they're from. As I said I struggled to actually find 301 affiliate links.

[HLRob]

Originally Posted by littleman

Some time ago I wrote a small custom aff tracker that worked on referer to credit affiliates. This way we could dump links right to the index page without any redirect.

I'd be careful with referer based affiliate tracking - if the links target a new window then about 10% of your data is lost (Firefox follows the spec in this regard) and some firewall software (ZoneAlarm, Norton Personal Firewall) are now blocking referers by default*.

*On a side note: this appears to be when you move from one site to another rather than when you navigate a site so leech protection should still be possible.

[Marcia]

And then, what if the affiliates are running their links through 302's on their own sites with scripts before they ever get to your site? Many do nowadays. What then?

[asrguy]

Originally Posted by Head SEO Bull

...What's your opinion on 301's vs 302's with affiliates?

Affiliates usually don't have a choice of the link format. There are other options to merchants depending on the affiliate tracking system they go with. These options are:
1) Naked links - i.e. direct link to the merchant domain with no ?/affid
2) Subdomain - e.g. affiliate123.merchant.com

As for how the engines view all this who knows? Some people say that over time the links and passing PR etc. is getting less important .vs. having good indexable content on your site, and that of your affiliates.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Peter

[Marcia]

will be harder and harder for affiliates to send traffic in future, if they are seen as affiliates (run of site links).

You keep saying "run of site links" but where are you getting the idea that affiliate links are "run of site?"

My premise is that as people and SEs get savvier they will trust affiliate links less.

The premise is incorrect. Actually, the reality is there are plenty of shoppers who bookmark affiliate sites so they can return to them - to the tune of 10%, 15-20% and even as high as 40% bookmark rates.

They will only trust real, direct links to the site coming from real content.

Aside from being a false assumption, how do you expect to track those direct links so that they will provide reliable tracking that affiliates can see for themselves whether or not they're being credited for the clicks and being paid for the traffic they're sending?

The primary problem is not with customers trusting affiliate sites, the serious problem is more with affiliates being able to trust merchants.