If you run your own affiliate program, and also build traffic from search engine, today’s tip will be very useful to you.
Most affiliate links look something like this:
www.yourProgram.com?r=referid
With a good affiliate program, you can easily get hundreds or thousands of websites linking to your homepage through the customized affiliate links.
Does it mean you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks pointing to your homepage? Sad to say, NO!
Search engines treat www.yourProgram.com?r=referid as a new url that is different from www.yourProgram.com. So when someone links to www.yourProgram.com?r=referid, it is as good as linking to another url on your website. That link will not count as a backlink to your homepage.
Fortunately, there is a simple trick to overcome this problem. It’s by using 301 redirect.
301 redirect means “permanently moved”. When you add 301 redirect on www.yourProgram.com?r=referid, pointing it to www.yourProgram.com, you are telling the search spiders that the referral url has permanently moved to your homepage.
301 redirect is search engine friendly. The search engines understand that since a url is permanently moved to another url, all the links on the former url should now belong to the new url.
How To Create 301 Redirect?
This is a technical question and I will not go into the details. There are many technical blogs and forums on the net where you can get the details. In this article, I’ll just show you what I use for my own websites. It’s a simple PHP script that I add to the index.php file of my websites.
<?
if ($r <> “”) {
header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
header(“Location: http://www.yourProgram.com”);
exit();
}
?>
This script simply says if ?r=[someReferID] exist, i.e. if it’s an affiliate link, add 301 Redirect on that page and redirect it to your homepage.
With this code, the search engine will ignore the referral url and credit all the backlinks to your homepage.
Hi and many thanks for that article and the php redirect script.
I was aware of the redirect but was not quite sure of the seo consequences.
Many thanks
Hamant
But what happens to the credit for the affiliate if the link is stripped? Doesn’t it act like the link came with no affiliate getting credit?
Good point. Affiliate IDs should be cookied before executing this script, so that there is no lost of affiliate credit.
Regards,
Kenneth
I am a newbie to this to apply this 301 redirect script and I dont know how to cookied my affilliate ID…can you tell me how to cookied my affilliate ID?
has recently upgraded its Site Explorer , which provides a much more comprehensive list of backlinks than Google does. Url
Hey,
Great info. Learnt something new. Didn’t know about 301. Still in the learning curve.
thanks you,.nice info
Thanks again Kenneth…
This is great info for those either running or thinking about running their own affiliate programs. The importance of backlinks cannot be stressed enough to grow your site organically.
Backlink building, traffic, advertising, posting, blogging plus of course content, content and more content! This is search engine marketing.
Thanks for the advise I will ask my marketers if they use 301 links because to be honest I would have no clue on how too do this. I’m sure I would leasrn but truthfully I just want to get my affiliate program to be making money.
That’ why I decided to hire professionals too do the advertising on the net for me.
I been paying attention to how the rich and the poor do differnt things in making money and what I discovered is that the rich hire people to do most of there work like advertising and do just part of the work themselves.
So I’m taking this approach and want to see what happens So far it’s making my work alot less stressful and gives me more time too understand my affiliate program since I don’t have too put all my concentration on learning how too advertise
Best wishes too all
Jimmy
Holy smokes, I’ve been looking for ways to improve my results on affiliate programs for about 3 years now. I hate affiliate links, as a rule, because of the inability to track the results effectively.
Who knows if the affiliate program is actually stealing my signups.
This simple script is about to make it to my list of must do list, and see if it makes a huge difference.
SEO has been my ongoing task for at least a year, and that brick wall of affiliate links has been holding me back.
Cool trick, thanks! I tried in the past but couldn’t figure how to. I’ll try again.
I am using affiliate links now and this post is an eye opener for me to avoid backlink links today and in the future.
its really nice trick….
This sounds correct i am running an affiliates program on my site that i just had started working on i am not sure who programmed it but i have not been getting many affiliates to sign up. I looked at the programes on the net and i hate backlinks i think the whole thing is a mess. I have been in seo for years and know of this a long time ago it took me allot of time and money to get members to a great site.
I dont believe in any of this mess of online programes sorry if you want traffic pay like i did advertise it takes money out of my hand thats not too cool.
Hey couldn’t you just use a program like adfly.com where it gives you one of them tiny bit looking url’s something like http://tinyurllink.com. I use this now on some of my affiliate programs and it does seem to get alot more results.
I am not sure what you mean by tinyurllink you mean what i am lost as to what you are saying and also i am affraid if i put this
<?
if ($r “”) {
header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
header(”Location: http://www.yourProgram.com”);
exit();
}
?>
into my index page it may cause problems for me that’s why I said I never seen such a messy index page and there are so many ways to block a 301 redirect there is other code as well that will de rank the people trying to use programs to back link to you it just sends them back to you but in a better way so to speak sound good.
There is also analysis of who is linking to you and to cut off non affiliates links so to speak I don’t know it sounds great remember there is always a man above one
This above means well so to speak you get what you pay for correct?
Tinyurllinks.com was just an example to see what I really mean go to http://adfly.com put your url in and you’ll see what I’m talking about thanks for the concern and pointing that out Juliano