SEO Friendly Tracking Links
Created: February 18, 2010
Last Edited: February 18, 2010
The most important part of Search Engine Optimization is link building, which is why it is important to advantage of the abundance of links published by your affiliates. HasOffers SEO Friendly Tracking allows affiliate links to pass "link juice," giving them real weight in the search engines and greatly improving your search rankings.
The Problem with Traditional Affiliate Links
Traditional affiliate links do not use custom domains. Instead, they use tracking domains that search engines easily identify as non-authorities. Most affiliate links also attach tracking code at the end of the links to advertiser landing pages – which search engines identify as duplicate content.
Other SEO friendly link technology can complicated to implement, requiring special codes to be placed on the advertiser web pages to compensate the correct affiliates for conversions/sales. Not only is this process difficult, but it increases the risk of inaccurate tracking.
Easily implement and distribute SEO friendly tracking links with HasOffers
Setup a custom tracking domain that is only associated with your network. Custom tracking domains prevent search engines from tagging specific tracking links as spammy or illegitimate and helps them to continue to provide valuable back links.
Simply enable the "SEO friendly tracking links" feature for the offer you wish to build links toward with one easy click.
Offers with the SEO friendly feature enabled automatically generate shortened tracking URLs – tiny URLs. These tiny URLs prevent search bots from detecting duplicate content issues and prevents long and messy URL strings.
HasOffers SEO tracking links record affiliate activity before forwarding on to landing pages using 301 redirects. 301 redirects allow "link juice" to flow from thousands of tracking links to the landing page found on the advertiser's domain, increasing the number of counted back links to that domain and boosting search engine rankings.
Enabling SEO Friendly Tracking Links
A custom tracking domain is required for enabling SEO Friendly Tracking Links. Once your network has set up a custom tracking domain, enable SEO freindly links by editing an offer and changing the SEO Friendly status to Enable. Follow this step by saving changes to your offer. By enabling the SEO Friendly feature, you will no longer be able to redirect offers to any page other than the intended landing page. For this reason, geo-targeting, browser targeting, and conversion caps are disabled for that offer.
How It Works
Once SEO Friendly links are enabled, all tracking links are abbreviated in a tiny URL format. This link then 301 redirects to the offer URL listed in the offer settings. The 301 identifier communicates to search engines that the page found at the affiliate URL has been permanently forwarded to the offer URL. This method of redirection is the only way to preserve the recognition of back links for improving search engine rankings. Remember to encourage affiliates to display their tracking links using keywords in the anchor text to enhance the SEO impact of each link. Below is a diagram that demonstrates all of this information.
