When calculating your site’s ranking in search results, search engines consider several factors, one being the quantity and quality of the links pointing to your site. If you have an affiliate program chances are you have a lot of links from you affiliate sites pointing to yours. The question is how do this affiliate links affect your SEO efforts.

There are two ways affiliate sites can point to yours. The first is network-wide sites that first point to the affiliate administrator’s server and then redirects to your merchant site. The second is affiliate network solutions that directly link to your merchant site. These links help track click-through and conversion rates so that commissions can be paid to your affiliates. So if you have thousands of affiliates, you’ll have thousands of back links. However, with search engines that consider link popularity in their ranking algorithms these affiliate links don’t count for your rankings.

There are newer affiliate programs and networks that help merchants get some value from these links, but these programs do have some risk. For example, Google watches how fast new links to a site appear. They use this to detect and penalize search engine spam. If Google sees too many new links in too short of a timeframe they will penalize or possibly ban the site. Google also watches how many new links have identical anchor text. This aids them in finding what they consider to be search engine spam.

While it is important to receive credit for your backlinks, what you want to keep in mind is the quality of these links rather than the quantity. Therefore, take your time when creating backlinks, even within your affiliate sites. This way you can receive credit where credit is due and not worry about your site being penalized or banned by they major search engines.

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