Affiliate Tracking & SEO Best Practices

Jan Bischoff, May 18, 2016

Used correctly, every affiliate link can contribute to your link building and help improve your search engine rankings. In this post, we'll show you how to use affiliate marketing to boost your SEO.

Let's look at a typical affiliate link. It contains a tracking domain, a question mark, and a range of parameters. But all we actually need to attribute traffic to an affiliate is the traffic source.

If affiliates have their own domain – and over 95% of top affiliates do – the referrer that the browser transmits to the target page (in 85–95% of cases) is sufficient for attribution. Referrer tracking has been available as a feature in QUALITYCLICK since 2004.

Many of our clients already use these clean links to gradually build natural backlinks. For each affiliate, they can decide whether links should be follow or nofollow. You can also add your own custom domains – such as google.com, facebook.com, or publisher sites – to the tracking. You'll then immediately receive click and sales stats for organic traffic sources and social media channels.

An advanced option is Anchor Tracking. Links to your landing pages get an anchor appended: e.g., www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html#Q21C9Yg1n. Search engines recognize these as organic links, since anchors have been widely used for in-page navigation since HTML5.

Anchor tracking links are encrypted and contain the PartnerID, creative ID, and optionally a SubID. They are also n:1 encrypted, meaning each creative gets a unique link – so competitors can't use a Google search to discover all your affiliate sites.

Within QUALITYCLICK, you can decide on a per-affiliate and per-campaign basis which links should be SEO-relevant.

Note: when using anchor tracking, set the canonical tag on your pages so search engines know which URL is the definitive content URL.

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