rel="nofollow" for Affiliate Links?

[Holis]

Can someone walk me thru the setup of this /visit/pokerstars/ layout?

Im assuming i add an index.htm file for each site but im not sure what goes in this index file...

Thanks in advance

[CK]

Create a folder called visit. Inside of it create a page for each of your programs and save it within that folder. So for example you would save pokerstars as pokerstars.html inside the visit folder.

End result would look like /visit/pokerstars.html


Then in the htaccess you would do 301 redirects

Redirect 301 /visit/pokerstars.html http://pokerstarslinkshere.com

and do this for each of links you want to redirect

There is a php way but I prefer the htaccess method myself

[MewsicLovr]

Actually you don't even need the folder or file. Just the redirect. I use a slightly modified redirect though (RewriteRule) so maybe Redirect requires the file to exist.

[addaminsane]

i was going to say, you all should be using redirects. they allow you to change all links in one place and actually do insure that you aren't contributing to the merchant outranking you and everyone else.

Also in robots.text you shoud disallow the crawling of the visit folder!!

edit: after reading this thread and being saddened that too many affiliates are not redirecting i created a redirect tutorial

[BigMouth]

A fantastic post, pretty much all you need to know, thanks Michael:

The whole business with using nofollow to conserve PageRank was nonsense anyway. There are a lot of people in the SEO industry who slap a load of crap on their blogs and strut it out at conferences and act like they know what they are doing when, in fact, they're just getting by on pure dumb luck and more hard work than they would need to put into their projects if they just stopped trying to act like Real Algorithm Chasers.

nofollow was proposed as a way for bloggers to strip link spammers of some of the value they were stealing from blogs by leaving links in comments. It only prevented search engines from crawling those links and passing PageRank from the blogs to the spam destinations. But those links remained in place, creating visibility and sometimes sending traffic to truly unworthy sites.

A couple of years ago nofollow was proposed as a tool for "sculpting PageRank", which was a truly stupid monstrosity that very bad, incompetent SEOs were using to hide the fact that they could not figure out how to optimize really badly designed sites. Their pathetic excuse was that they were not allowed to change the badly designed sites (but the CORRECT solution in that situation is to obtain more value-passing links from other sites).

Earlier this year, after noticing the widespread abuse of nofollow by SEOs (meaning, Google detected a lot MORE screwed up Web sites that were hurting themselves in the search results by using it), Google decided to dis-incentivize nofollow by forcing it to dissipate 1 links' worth of PageRank to the rest of the Web.

Whereas before nofollowed links were treated as if they didn't exist, now they are treated as if they are holes in your bucket, forcing the PageRank to flee your Web site even faster than it normally would (you cannot, under any circumstances, prevent your site from pushing PageRank to other sites).

It will unfortunately take about 2 years for all the bad, stupid, insane arguments in favor of using nofollow to "sculpt" PageRank to be shouted down and corrected as newbie after newbie reads those old blog posts and asks in forums and on blogs if they can still do this.

And even then some people won't get the message.

No one should be basing their search engine optimization on PageRank. If you think that's what it's all about, you've been reading the wrong SEO blogs and tutorials. You need some PageRank to get your site crawled, indexed above the Supplemental Results Index, and recrawled. You don't need to try and concentrate PageRank into a small number of pages.

That's a completely idiotic approach and there is absolutely nothing "optimal" about trying to manage your internal linking that way.

SO WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH AFFILIATE LINKS?

Affiliate links are a very special case. People are afraid the search engines may identify their sites as "affiliate sites" and demote them in the search results if the search engines find affiliate links. For a site that has little to no content per page, that's pretty much what happens.

If you put a lot of relevant, informative text on your page and work your affiliate links into the design and theme of the copy, you should be fine.

Some affiliates, however, don't want to help their merchants outrank them. In that case, either use non-competitive anchor text or use nofollow -- but use it with the understanding that you are giving up a little bit of PageRank you otherwise could have channeled through the rest of your site before it moved on to the rest of the Web.

You cannot keep the PageRank. It's not yours. It doesn't belong to you. You don't need to keep it anyway. It does its thing and it moves on. Think of it like water flowing through your yard. No matter how many boards you put up along your fence, that water will still seep through holes, drain away into the ground, and/or evaporate into thin air.

That is exactly what happens with PageRank. People really need to stop thinking in terms of "what can I do with my PageRank".

Just build a really solid internal navigation system that helps your visitors get from one page to the next and the PageRank will take care of itself.

[pokeraussie]

Create a folder called visit. Inside of it create a page for each of your programs and save it within that folder. So for example you would save pokerstars as pokerstars.html inside the visit folder.

End result would look like /visit/pokerstars.html


Then in the htaccess you would do 301 redirects

Redirect 301 /visit/pokerstars.html http://pokerstarslinkshere.com

and do this for each of links you want to redirect

There is a php way but I prefer the htaccess method myself

I prefer htaccess redirects as well, but the way you explained it makes it sound like you need to create a new folder on the server, when really its just a virtual folder or file depending on how you set it up.

[RayUK]

By adding this you violate the TOS of many rooms which state you are not allowed to alter any of the link code you are given. If you use rel="nofollow" your account can be terminated immediately according to these agreements. Does it happen? no, but you affiliates have zero clout when it comes to arguing about anything with these rooms because almost 100% of the members here are in violation in some way. They can do whatever they want to you.

The link code in my php redirect is identical to the one given by the sponsor. It just so happens that the php file is in a /go/ directory that is disallowed in robots.txt and my own internal link to it is nofollowed.

This also stops random /go/*.php listings appearing in the SERPs. The nofollow helps with this problem, from Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file - Webmaster Tools Help :

While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web.

This of course only works so long as no one else links to my redirect files. Also whether or not one wants these files to appear in the SERPs is another question! Would I be better not nofollowing these links from an SEO perspective? I still don't know having heard many arguments on both sides.