SEO Lion’s Blog

Using affiliate system for SEO advantages

In an affiliate tracking system, there will be usually a referring URL containing the unique id of the referrer to credit the commission.

If affiliates use there referring URL’s as links from their site, it will be counted as a back link pointing to the site’s URL having the affiliates unique id.

Now think of a situation where you have a number of affiliates doing marketing with the above method. there will be an equivalent number of landing URL’s but all with the same content.

In this way we are actually inviting the supplement listings for our site.

How to avoid this and use the same for SEO advantages.

The affiliate tracking system can be modified as follows.

Direct traffic to a tracking page which records the hit from an affiliate. If you are using a server sided script like PHP, its easy to set a cookie with the response headers. Give out a proper 301 redirect response and redirect the visitor to the actual site.

Once conversion happens, check out the affiliate id from cookie and mark conversion from that affiliate.

By using a 301 redirect, you are actually redirecting the backlinks to the real site which will boost the sites SEO performances.