What should I do with my affiliate links?

[jani2500]

Hi,

I am owner of the Nettikasinklubi

I was thinking that should I change my links for bit.ly or for somekind of other shortener links? My links are now like normal affiliatelinks and when visitor put the cursor over the buttom he/she sees normal affiliatelink..

What is your opinion? Is normal affiliatelinks bad for Seo and bad for Google?

Thanks,
Jani

[universal4]

I would recommend against using any third party website for your links.

Just use a simple (non indexed) redirect page either in php or html for each link. Place those links in their own folder (such as go or visiit or xyz) and restrict that folder with robots.txt

Each link would then just be xyz.com/visit/casino1.php or xyz.com/go/casino3.html

Now, if you don't mind adding 100 or so lines to your htaccess file, you can choose to use that method. The link would then look like xyz.com/casino3

If you are running wordpress you can use a plugin for links and each link followed will be another query on the database.

The first method listed is the fastest, the second is fast and used by many, with the plugin method being used by some, but has an advantage since some plugins will provide addition click stats for the speed loss.

Rick
Universal4

I dug out a few of our other discussions on this topic

https://www.gpwa.org/forum/hide-affi...le-215224.html
https://www.gpwa.org/forum/better-lo...ks-214339.html
www.gpwa.org/forum/how-mask-affiliate-links-219172.html

[sweetbet]

I wouldn't use a 3rd party service like bit.ly because you never know when they will change their policies, etc. and affect your business. I would do exactly what Rick has suggested.

[Rostick]

I conclude with the above answers. No third party, if bit.ly goes out of business you are screwed and that`s only one of the possible issues. Use redirects in the htaccess file, it`s pretty easy to do if you are at least a beginner with these things.

You can use something like

RewriteRule ^pinnacle$ http://affiliatelinkfrompinnacle [P]

It will transform the link to nettikasinklubi.fi/pinnacle

Please do a little research it if you are a total rookie and make backups, as any bad thing you do in htaccess will make your website unavailable.

There`s also some php job you can do and other stuff (see first answer by Universal4) but it`s more complicated IMO. I think this is your best option and you can learn pretty quickly even if you are a rookie (I was, and I learned to do it properly in about 1 hour).

And no, it`s not bad for google.

[MMM]

Agree with the above. I prefer the first method Rick mention as the easiest and no need to touch the htaccess file. You can take a look here for exact details and codes. http://www.affiliatebible.com/genera...iate-links.php

[WagerPod]

In wordpress I use /play/affiliatelink and then simply do a nofollow noindex in robots.txt - on occasion I may use the rel nofollow for safe measure but never had any problems with this system, works well for me.

[universal4]

The method I suggested is MUCH easier and less risk and LOWER OVERHEAD on your site than using the htaccess method.

The method I suggest is about a 3 line php page in a folder restricted by robots.txt file. You can use html/html if your site is in html format.

A lot of affiliates refer the htaccess method, I am just not a bog fan of adding 100 extra lines to that file, to handle 100 different affiliate links.

I do agree with Rostick on the point that no matter which method you use, be sure to research it a little before making a decision, and be sure to back up everything before making site wide changes.

That's a good link MMM mentioned, I had forgotten who it was that had the easiest to understand page up. The only method they fail to show is the html method, which is basically a blank page with a meta refresh of 0 seconds to handle the redirect.

Here is one example at w3c
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H76.html

The only thing I would add to some of these examples is using the no-index tag on the actual rdirect page that has the affy code.

Rick
Universal4