Nofollow tag on your affiliate links?

VegasPokerPro.com · #1 09-28-2006, 12:17 AM

I would like to know how many of you use a 'nofollow' tag on all of your links to the poker rooms?

I see that most people, at least the big sites (pokernews, pokerlistings, macpokeronline, etc...) direct these links to internal pages that then redirect to the appropriate room. Do they use a nofollow on these internal pages?

Will this help wrt SEO purposes. i.e. will google look more favorably on your site if they don't see links that are affiliate related?

Also, do you use the nofollow tag on your main pages, or only on the page that houses the redirect?

Mark

Holis · #2 09-28-2006, 08:33 AM

Im in the process of converting all my links over to internal pages that are blocked by robots.txt.

I do not currently have no follow on the internal pages (very good question VPP)

PPP · #3 09-28-2006, 06:38 PM

Nofollow doesn't do anything SEO-wise other than it is good to tag links to domains that are penalized or otherwise have a "bad" reputation. You'll have to decide for yourself if any/some/all the cardrooms qualify or not.

Linking to internal pages is just a way to count clicks, so not really related to anything else.

Brandon · #4 09-28-2006, 06:48 PM

PPP, does it conserve Pagerank by having less outgoing links?

PPP · #5 09-29-2006, 02:39 AM

It doesn't do anything to conserve pagerank. It is still a link. It doesn't pass pagerank to the other site, but you don't get to "keep" it. That would defeat the whole point.

DealerDan · #6 09-29-2006, 02:45 AM

I have all my affiliate links set up in separate .html documents, as I am anal about W3C HTML Validation

They're all in separate directories(sitename.com/casino/golden-palace-casino.html) etc, and I just used HTAccess to tell the robots to skip em. It made it a lot easier for me to track what affiliate links actually get clickthroughs too, where from etc.

SmackDog · #7 10-06-2006, 01:35 PM

So if I'm understanding this correctly:

I first setup a page, for examples /pokerroom.asp

Then I make this page redirect to my affiliate link

Then all the places on my site that I currently have an affiliate link to pokerroom.com I link to this new page.

This right?

Thanks,

SmackDog

pokermonger · #8 10-07-2006, 08:30 AM

Yes, that is correct

adioking · #9 10-11-2006, 02:57 PM

Don't use the no follow tag. If you are using it, Google thinks that you don't trust the site that you are linking to and don't want to give them the link "vote."

Think of it this way... why the hell would you "vote" for somebody that you don't trust?

As for internal pages, I highly recommend it. If the shit hits the fan or you need to change all your links to a new tracker, you can do it from just a couple files, and not have to change hundreds of links.

Major time saver.

pokermac · #10 10-22-2006, 08:44 PM

I agree - I use one folder blocked by robots.txt and direct all my internal links there. In that folder each of the affiliate links has its own page which redirects and has analytics code. Makes life easy. Don't know about SEO, etc... but I could never keep track of all my affiliate links otherwise.