It has been known that tracking and SEO cannot come together. Well, there are some snares but used in the right way most of your incoming affiliate links
could help you with linkbuilding. Let's start with the typical affiliate link. It usually contains a specific tracking domain, question marks and all those chatty parameters
needed. Really? What parameters do i really need in order to track and pay an affiliate commission on customers he refers to me? None, just the referal website.
If your affiliates are using their own domains - and 80% do so - you can identify incoming traffic just by the referer. That's what Referer Tracking is about. Traffic
from Google, Bing, other company websites like business cooperations and even affiliate traffic is recognized at 80% just by the referer. So if your affiliates add all
their inventory in their account and you approve these domains, your affiliates are able to use clean links like http://www.your-website.de/page1.html - without any parameters.
And these links are even good for content marketing like advertiorials and mentions in online newspapers.
Our Affiliate Software's second option for linking without parameters is Anchor Tracking. All links get an anchor at the end of the url, like http://www.your-website.de/page1.html#Q21C9Yg1n
which is recognized by Search Engines as an organic link. These link scheme is used more widely since HTML5 came up and mostly used for navigation within dynamic websites
or One-Page-Applications. Even Affiliate SubIDs can be encoded within our dynamic anchor. And one more thing: These links can be n:1 encrypted meaning no second link from
the same affiliate gets the same token. So your competitors cannot find other affiliate websites by knowing one of your top affiliates token. By using this link scheme you should also
set the canonical tag in your web page to let search engines know what is the one unique content url. Within QualityClick you can decide on an per-affiliates-and campaign base,
which links get SEO-relevant. This is done by an attribute follow or nofollow for these affiliates links.
Both trackings allow first party cookie tracking on your website and require a small Javascript inserted into your web pages templates header or footer.
QualityClick also supports more tracking options like cookieless session tracking, clickid tracking, server2server tracking, conversion tracking for affiliates, landingpage tracking,
mobile tracking, SubID tracking, Encrypted affiliate IDs, Postview Tracking and Productfeed tracking.
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21
May 2016
by Jan Bischoff