Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do you find Affiliate Links on your site that have not been nofollowed?
-
We've just signed up to an affiliate scheme because we were sending links to them because we thought their product was valuable to our users. So we now have to go through and nofollow all of these links over 100's of pages.
Is there any way that do a crawl of the site to identify all links to a particular site and tell me what page they are on and whether they are nofollow/follow?
-
Actually, screamingfrog should take care of it for you via the custom spider configuration. If you select "custom" under the "configuration" tab, you can drop in the html for the links you are looking for and it will give you a report with what pages it finds that code on.
For example, have screammingfrog search for the following snippet of code and it would find nofollow links pointing at mysite.com:
rel="nofollow" href="http://mysite.com
-
Hi there,
There's a few options for this outside of Screaming Frog, but they depend on how your site is developed.
My first thought would be to write a small script that looks for instances of this domain and checks if the link is nofollow, if not it inserts a nofollow tag. Depending on how your site is coded this could be risky, but I think you could do something nifty in PHP if you know the site and the language well. This is probably a quick-fix but not a massively sustainable solution as you'd be running a function each time - might get a bit laggy? It'd allow you to provide a quick-fix to the issue while you work on it separately, depending on how your site is developed.
An alternative you could do, if you use a system such as Wordpress would be to Export an RSS feed of content and use Notepad++'s regex find and bookmarking to highlight all instances of this domain within your page content where you don't use nofollow and replace with nofollow versions. This is time consuming, but would work. Also relies on Notepad++ not dying due to the size of the RSS feed!
Another alternative would be to use OSE and create an advanced report, which looks at only Follow links that come from your root domain and point to the affiliate domain in question. This method relies on Moz crawling your links and finding them - Might be tricky if those links are new.
You could also use Xenu to find only external links pointing out to that domain from your website and go through them manually. But that's not much fun either.
Hope there's something there that can be gleaned or used!
-
I am not sure if there is any link but I guess if you run screaming frog that will tell you how many of links that are going out contain follow and no follow tag but again for that you actually have to go URL by URL so this will not really going to cut any of your time.
I would love to hear from any other person in the community who is either using this kind of tool or know this kind of tool exist.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
Hi All, I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt. Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
Affiliate Marketing | | nomad_blogger0 -
Blocking external links in Robots.txt - need advice on Best Practice
I look after an affiliate site that is doing quite well in the search rankings. We've been doing a review of our practices and one thing that has cropped up is our robots.txt. In it, we disallow Google from crawling external links. This used to be best practice in the affiliate industry a couple of years ago, but I wanted to know if this is still the case, and what the implications are if we were to: a/ leave it as is? b/ allow crawling? Thanks in advance.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ben_Malkin_Develo0 -
Looking for a way to crawl and test validity of affiliate links at scale. Ideas?
Hey all, I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something? Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis. Bi75jku
Affiliate Marketing | | BradsDeals0 -
Sneaky redirect happening on my wordpress site.
On my site, gosandiego.com I have a couple links at the top which directly link to another site. However, I noticed that when I click on the link, it seems to go to another site for a few milliseconds before being redirected to the correct destination. It took a little while but I was able to take a screenshot of the sneaky redirect. It starts awin1.com/awclick.php... I am fairly sure that awin1.com belongs to Affiliate Window, an affiliate marketing company much like Commission Junction but smaller. I just had someone email about my site and said the link redirected on him too but his browser got sent to viglink.com I was wondering, Has someone hijacked my site or has someone hijacked my browser or is it something else? Thanks 0LBwUoc
Affiliate Marketing | | EdKim0 -
Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?
Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank? We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past. We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains. Thanks for looking!
Affiliate Marketing | | tennisexpress0 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense. If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site. But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
Merchant´s data feed for affiliates is the same content as their own website...
Hi Some advice appreciated. Started working on a site and found out that they are giving their unique content to their affiliates (an XML feed so appearing on another domain). In this case, if they want to provide the data like that, how can we protect ourselves? Should we use author tags in our html, is that necessary? Is there any fix other than "stop doing that and give them different content"? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | xoffie0 -
Can anyone help me find the broadband ISP affiliate program I need?
I have a couple sites that deal with broadband internet access, and I'm looking to monetize beyond adsense. I'd like to sign up for some affiliate programs from internet service providers like Charter, CenturyLink, Comcast, etc. I found a couple affiliate programs but I am having no luck at all figuring out the programs that so many other websites are involved with. In about every case, the user is able to enter in their address and then a search is performed, returning programs available at their location. The programs I've found just do the traditional ad click-throughs for a possible commission. Can anyone enlighten me what kind of programs they are using?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0