Best practices for affiliate links

Best practices for affiliate links

A typical affiliate link to LiveJasmin.com looks like the following example: //awecrptjmp.com/?siteId=jasmin&categoryName=&pageName=home&performerName=&prm[psid]=YOURPSIDHERE&prm[pstool]=205_1&prm[psprogram]=revs&prm[campaign_id]=&subAffId={SUBAFFID}&filters=

Instead of a direct link to the site, our affiliate links are now sent to another location first, the jump site.

As we see in the example above, affiliate links often contain one or more URL parameters for the affiliate code, campaign ID, program type, etc. Obviously these are not very nice or friendly URLs. On top of that it’s more difficult to maintain correct URLs in case the URL structure of the pointed site would change, resulting in the affiliate URL to give a 404 (not found) error. On a big site, it may even be hard to find any specific affiliate URL.

To avoid problems with your affiliate links, the best practice is to cloak them. Cloaking an affiliate link means that you create a pretty, friendly URL that redirects to the ‘ugly’ affiliate link.

The main reasons for cloaking are:

• Creating clean links that explain where you send the user. (We believe that to be a better practice than trying to hide where you send users.)
• Better outgoing link management.
• Prevent link juice to flow from your page to the advertiser’s site.
• Increase your own link profile and prevent a penalty for unnatural links from your site.

And yes, cloaking your affiliate links is allowed according to the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Cloaking your affiliate links

Cloaking your affiliate will make an ugly link pretty. For example, with the above mentioned URL, you could make a friendly, cloaked URL like:

http://example.com/out/pretty-link

Which could become something like the following for a link to LiveJasmin.com:

http://example.com/out/livejasmin/

or, with a deeper link to a category page:

http://example.com/out/livejasmin/girl/

The ‘out’ part can be replaced by any term, like ‘partner’, go’, ‘affiliate’, ‘to’, ‘pp’, etc. The ‘out’ just becomes a simple virtual directory on your site that bundles all of your outgoing links.

There are many different ways to cloak your URLs. Of course you can create your own script to do it for you. But if you’re using a CMS like WordPress, you might find a plugin you can install that makes cloaking really easy. One of the best WordPress (free) plugins to manage all your redirects is Redirection. An additional benefit of this plugin is that you can use regular expressions to easily use patterns in the URLs to redirect. This allows you to automate cloaking even further, without having to manually create the pretty URLs. With functionality to manage your affiliate links, you can change a URL into another without having to change anything in the content of old articles.

Bottom line is that you have the pretty URL that you want to have redirected with a 302 redirect to the affiliate URL:

Pretty:
http://example.com/out/livejasmin/

Affiliate:
//awecrptjmp.com/?siteId=jasmin&categoryName=&pageName=home&performerName=&prm[psid]=YOURPSIDHERE&prm[pstool]=205_1&prm[psprogram]=revs&prm[campaign_id]=&subAffId={SUBAFFID}&filters=

A 302 redirect is used because it will not pass link juice.

Prevent the links from passing PageRank

Since you don’t want to pass PageRank (link juice) to the advertiser’s site, you don’t want the search engines to follow your affiliate links. It also prevents your own site from getting a Google penalty for unnatural outgoing links.

There are two ways to do this:

• Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link (<a>) tag
  Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute for every outgoing affiliate link tells search engines not to follow the link. Nofollow-links do not transfer PageRank.
• Block access to the URL using robots.txt
  Another way to prevent search engines to follow your cloaked affiliate links is to block them by the robots.txt file. This can be easily set up by adding a line in your robots.txt file:
  Disallow: /out/
  However, if you have used something else than ‘out’, put that in instead.
  This line tells the search engines not to follow any link in the ‘out’ directory.

If you don’t have a robots.txt file, you can just create one and place it in the root folder of your site.

It’s clear that once the second option has been properly implemented, it is much easier than the first option, which is more time-consuming and difficult to manage.