Reading Rand's post on the session with search engineers from the big 3 at SMX East spurred me on to write this post I’ve been meaning to commit to paper for a while. Point 2 of Rand's 6 ‘takeaways’ referred to affiliate programs and the PR value passed by do-follow affiliate links. 

This is a method I’ve been using for a while (I’m sure some posts have been written before about this stuff but I haven’t seen any lately), and I’ve always been a bit surprised that

a) the engines haven’t stomped it out, and

b) so few companies appear to be getting it right

I thought I’d go over some of the golden rules of exploiting the full potential of affiliate links and turning your affiliate campaign into a double threat by making it work on a referral and SEO level.

For your affiliate links to pass link juice from your affiliates to your site, what you need is a clean link from the affiliate to you. If you're an affiliate with a broker like tradedoubler or affiliatefuture, chances are your links gotta pass through their internal tracking before landing visitors on your site. If you’re lucky this will be done with a 301 so the search engines should in theory follow the link, but a lot can happen between the link and your landing page when you go through a middle man...

• They might be using a 302 or meta refresh (not ideal)
• They might block the bounce page in their robots file
• I’ve seen some programs which bounce the visitors 2 or more times before landing them on your site

Any of these things can damage the chances of link juice passing from your affiliates to you, so what can you do about that?

In my opinion, the best solution is to run your own affiliate scheme; that way, you control the links (and you might save a few bucks in the process). There’s plenty of off the shelf software which you can install on your site or subdomain, which will give you most of the same professional affiliate management features so your affiliates can login and manage their links, payments and so forth.

The big disadvantage, of course, is you’re not plugged into a network of affiliates, which means generating interest in your program is harder. But as I’ll explain later, the good affiliates will find you (with a little help!).

2. The anatomy of a clean affiliate link

To guarantee the passing of precious link juice and reduce the possibility of links being devalued for being from affiliates, there’s a clear winner for me when it comes to setting up your links. Let your affiliates link to you directly, without any tracking codes or bounce pages, and use their referrer information to credit the link to your affiliate.

There are 2 big advantages to this sort of tracking. First and foremost, the link is clean for the search engines. Secondly, smart affiliates will use this type of link to promote your site from within editorial content because the links are masked from any affiliate tracking. Even a savvy reader won’t spot the difference between genuine attribution of a natural link and cynical commercial, affiliate links. This makes your affiliate program more attractive and lucrative to your affiliates, which is good news for you--you’re starting to become a double threat!

There are other ways to get SEO-friendly links out of affiliates, but this is by far the cleanest. Check out botw.org’s affiliate program (or their SiteExplorer backlinks) for a great example of how to get your links right.

One of the systemic problems I often see with affiliate programs comes from the fact that the affiliate guys don’t talk to the SEO guys, or worse, the affiliate guy isn’t an affiliate guy at all but a sales and marketing guy or the work experience kid who makes banners in photoshop.

If you’re serious about optimising your affiliate campaign for maximum SEO impact, you need to think about what keywords you want to be targeting in your affiliate links, so someone should be screaming questions like:

• What keywords need the most work on the SEO side
• Which of those keywords convert best in paid search campaigns
• Which anchor text goes to which landing page (we’ll come onto these later)

Some affiliates (again, probably the more experienced ones) won’t use your recommended link text but many will just cut and paste the html you provide them, so double check you’ve got your keywords in the anchor text and you’re making use of the link title attribute- every little helps.

Don’t stop with your text links, either. Buttons, banners and even flash can actually be even more lucrative for links because most affiliates will copy and paste the code you give them straight onto their site, often in juicy places like the top banner slot of their homepage. When you formulate your embed code, make sure you include a <noscript> or <noembed> tag and stuff (gently) those tags full of anchor links. My personal preference when using banners, particularly with flash, would be to load the flash with javascript and use the noscript tag to serve links to the search engines. This negates any possibility the search engines will try to read the content of my swf files, much better to just serve them some nice clean html in the <noscript>.

For a bonus point, why not wrap your <noscript> text in an <h2> tag to pass some extra juice through the link, something like:

<noscript><h2>Check out this great <a href="http://www.mysite.com/anchor-text.html" title="anchor text">anchor text</a></h2></noscript>

If you’re old school and using animated gifs, firstly, I salute you. Secondly, don’t forget your keywords in the alt text.

(Will Rogers- http://thinkexist.com/quotes/will_rogers/ )

For me this is the single biggest killer of link juice passing affiliate campaigns. Some companies (not many) get all the above ingredients right, but then go and waste all that link juice by using a landing page for their affiliate banners and text links with little or no optimisation (or at least no landing page SEO strategy).

The temptation with affiliate links is to target them at your best converting pages, which may well be PPC landing pages which sit outside the main navigation of the site and in themselves have little or know overall SEO value. Another classic example would be the clever affiliate programs which let affiliates link to canned search results that aren’t even indexed pages.

So if I have a site about “what flowers to buy for what occasion,” I might want to show affiliate links for FlowersRus.com. The flowersRus affiliate software lets me deep link to ecommerce pages within the flowersRus site, so on my “what flowers to buy for a funeral” page I can deep link directly to a page made up of deals on lilies like FlowersRus.com/search.php?r=lilies.

But that page isn’t optimised, it's just a bunch of pictures of lilies with links through to products and worse, the page isn’t accessible from the main FlowersRus.com navigation. All that link juice from my site is wasted on this merchant because it's pointed at an unoptimised deep page. Ok, it will still have some benefit at a domain level, providing the landing page has links back to the homepage and other key pages but still, what a waste.

(the names and places in this reconstruction have been changed but the events depicted are real)

So the last lesson here is simple, point your affiliate links at key top level pages which have been optimised for certain keywords and encourage affiliates to link using anchor text relevant to that keyword. Again, some affiliates will use their own link text but chances are these links will point to your homepage, which is just fine.

This is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies (or chicken and egg situations) whereby a successful affiliate campaign will attract successful affiliates. When you step outside the ready-made affiliate markets of tradedoubler,  paid on results, etc., you lose the option to tap into their pool of affiliates.

However, what I’ve always found is that the best affiliates ( those with niche sites that drive serious traffic) tend to be tenacious enough to find the best affiliate programs which offer the highest commissions. Bear in mind that these quality affiliates will usually also be the guys with the best PR’s and the most link juice to pass.

There’s plenty of information out there on building a successful affiliate program (yourself), so I won’t go into that. But in a nutshell, if your affiliate program can tick these boxes you’ll make life a lot easier for yourself:

1. The affiliate page on your site is optimised so affiliates can easily track you down
2. You pay a generous commission
3. You look after your affiliates - think meet-ups and Christmas gifts (at least for the top ones)

Oh yeah, and don’t try and trick people into affiliate programs with you for the sake of links. You’ll only end up looking silly.

The best thing about SEO’ing your affiliate campaign is that most of these recommendations help your site on 2 levels:

1. It drives search engine-friendly links which boost your natural search rankings
2. It attracts better affiliates, which means higher affiliate referred traffic and more conversions

Wow, still reading - that means you’re a step closer to becoming a double threat - you animal! Now for a fun drinking game, read this post again and do a shot each time I use the words affiliate/juice.