Affiliate Link Building
Creating an affiliate program is actually one of the best ways to get back-links from other websites. It takes a lot more work than begging for links, but all the hours you put into creating an affiliate system is worth it. It doesn’t just give you links – it also drives real customer traffic into your website. We’re not talking about just signing up with a third-party affiliate program, which is easier, but certainly not helpful to link building. You need to create your very own affiliate program.
Why not just use Adsense or Commission Junction?
Big third party affiliate systems redirect links to your site through THEIR site in order to track sales, clicks, impressions, etc. So when a crawler sees your affiliate page, it sees a link to that affiliate site and NOT your site. You don’t get any link juice.
You also shouldn’t rely on off-the-shelf affiliate software because search engines like Google already know the really good ones, and your links can get thrown into the “paid links” blackhole. If you really want get links and continue getting links for the long haul, you need to create your own affiliate system from scratch.
Linking Strategy
The key is this: You need an easy way of generating links and linking codes for your affiliates. To make sure you get all the goodness of link juice, simply add parameters to your URL (example: affid=0123). Write a global include file that will look for the parameters in the URL, and then pull it out, and then stuff it in cookies. Use rel=canonical to tell Google and other search engines that the canonical version of the page is the one without the affiliate ID parameter.
You have to make it painless and very easy to link to the detail pages of your site. The affiliate should be able to log in, stuff his/her ID and log in state in a session-expiring cookie and also on each link-worthy web page (such as the page explaining your product details), and look for the cookie. Add a “block” to the page with a callout and your “linking HTML,” which encourages favorable anchor text. Do your products have thumbnails? Then you can give your affiliates two choices: a text link or an image link. Put the “linking HTML” in a multi line “read-only” text area and then add an “on-click handler” that can select the entire text in the box, making it easier for them to copy your HTML and making sure they don’t screw it up.
