Are You Bleeding Page Rank With Your Affiliate Links?

Posted at October 23, 2009

Bandaid As soon as you get into any type of SEO (search engine optimization) and trying to rank for your keywords, you start to hear a lot bout page rank and how to accumulate more of it on your website. Which brings me to our first point…

1) Pages Have Page Rank (not websites)

While the home page of a website almost always has the highest page rank on a website, PR is actually calculated on a page by page basis.

2) Links Don’t Create Page Rank

As one of my SEO mentors Leslie Rohde says: “Pages create page rank, links move it around”. This is an important point to keep in mind. If you’d like your entire website to gain in page rank, add more pages to it.Your other option is to use links to “channel” page rank from other pages on the web to your own site by building incoming links.

3) Don’t Bleed Your Page Rank

Since you are going through a lot of trouble to get my page rank into your website (by creating more content and by building more links into your website), you also want to make sure you don’t unnecessarily allow page rank to flow out of your pages, which brings us to the point of this post…

Each page on your website usually has several links on it. Most of those links are part of your internal site naviagion (links to your home page, category pages, possibly related posts or articles etc). As affiliate marketers we also have quite a few links that go out to various product offers on other people’s websites.

The way page rank works is that it takes the PR value of the particular page in question and then spread out the link juice available to the various links on that site. For illustration purposes, let’s say we have 100 PR points to give out. If that page has only 1 link, all 100 points would go to that one link. If we have 4 links on the page, each of them would transfer 25 pr points to the pages they link to.Â In other words the more pages we link out to, the more thinly spread the PR that we are transferring becomes.

While we do want to send as much page rank as possible around within our own site, there is no reason to also send some to our affiliate merchants. Remember, they pay us to send them traffic (in the form of commissions), not to help their sites to gain page rank.

If you are promoting quite a few affiliate products, this could potentially have a pretty big impact on your own web pages pr and where and how you rank for your keywords.

How Can I Stop Bleeding Page Rank With Affiliate Links?

It is actually pretty simple. You simple add rel=”nofollow” to the a href tag of all your affiliate links. Let me give you an example. Here’s my affiliate link for Jeff Herring’s “Article Marketing For Beginners”.

http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/articlemarketing

To make it a link, I would use the following HTML code:

<a href=”http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/articlemarketing”>Article Marketing For Beginners</a>

You can also create this code by typing “Article Marketing for Beginners”, then highlighting that text and using the chain symbol in your blogging or web editing software to create a hyperlink. Then switch to code or html mode and you’ll see the html code above.

To avoid bleeding out pagerank, we need to add the nofollow attribute to the link. Here’s how to do it:

<a href=”http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/articlemarketing” rel=”nofollow”>Article Marketing For Beginners</a>

Please note I only bolded the code above to make it easier for you to spot. You don’t have to do that in your own coding.

That’s it. Pretty simple, isn’t it? Now it’s just a matter of getting into the habit of adding that code to every single affiliate link you build on your website. I’m still working on that part, but am slowly getting better at it.

P.S. I have some homework for you today. Set aside at least 30 minutes today to stop some page rank bleeding. Find as many affiliate links as you can, the modify the html code and add “rel=nofollow” to your links. If you have a ton of affiliate links, you may want to schedule in a few of these sessions or hire someone to go through and change all your affiliate links. I’m going to do the same.

Comments

8 Responses to “Are You Bleeding Page Rank With Your Affiliate Links?”

Sharon McMillan says:

October 24, 2009 at 8:20 am

Thanks you Susanne. Usually my eyes start to glaze over when I start reading about SEO tactics but you explain and ILLUSTRATE so well I’m all set to go to my website and start fixing those affiliate links right now.

Reply
Kelly McCausey says:

October 25, 2009 at 9:32 am

Susanne, have you read how Google is treating no-follow links as far as link juice these days?

According to Matt Cutts, the link juice no longer gets redistributed. See this post for some more info:

http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume68/mattcutts-nofollow.html

Adding the no follow will stop link juice from draining out through that link but sadly, it doesn’t get redistributed to the other links as uniformly as it used to.

I still agree with you about adding a no-follow to outbound affiliate links – can’t hurt. I just doubt it helps as much as it once did as far as directing the link juice where we want it.

Reply
- Susanne Myers says:
  
  October 25, 2009 at 9:42 am
  
  Kelly, yes, I have read the post by Matt Cutts as well as plenty of other opinions on the matter. Are you familiar with Leslie Rohde? You can take a look at his take on nofollow – including the current changes in a video at http://seobraintrust.com/.
  
  He’s a pretty sharp guy (IMHO) and still suggest using nofollow to stop link juice from bleeding out of a site. While I don’t completely understand the math, Leslie makes a pretty compelling case that page rank can’t just evaporate and his own testing backs this up.
  
  You’re right that the nofollow doesn’t work as well for page rank sculpting anymore, but it still seems to be a pretty effective technique to help your overall PR.
  
  Reply
Cindi from Moomette's Magnificents says:

November 11, 2009 at 8:19 pm

Thanks for the suggestions – I’m going to go back and make all the necessary changes.

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Suzi says:

November 14, 2009 at 6:10 am

Hi. Does it matter where in the link the rel=â€nofollowâ€ appears.

Thanks,
Suzi

Reply
- Susanne Myers says:
  
  November 14, 2009 at 9:33 am
  
  HI Suzi,
  No, it doesn’t matter where in the tag the rel=”nofollow” appears. It can go before or after the actual link or any other parameters you have in there (i.e. opening a new window).
  
  Reply
Roberta Clark says:

October 27, 2010 at 12:32 pm

Thanks Suzanne, I think that as long as it doesn’t hurt, it may help. I’ll be adding the code to my links, especially the sites which are heavier in affiliate links.

Even though this is from 2009, it’s good information for beginners.

Reply
Elisabeth Kuhn says:

October 29, 2010 at 6:54 pm

Great info — I’m glad I came across it just now. I can see how this could leak link juice and so I’m going to go back and add that attribute to as many links as possible (and also any new affiliate links!

Thanks!

Elisabeth

Reply