I Have Problems With No-Follow Aff. Links

[cz]

As I posted some days ago I started using some affiliate links on one my e-commerce sites to transition out of this site. I want to see if I can earn a little revenue w/o losing my high SERPS.

I was advised (I think) to use rel="nofollow" attribute in the affiliate links, but for some reason they are displaying the site without the w/o the affiliate I.D.

If I put a direct link like http://www.thesite.com/affiliateI.D. - these will work properly but are hideous looking. I phoned the company and they're supposed to get back with me and never did.

Anyone see anything obviously wrong with this HTML afffiliate link?

<B><a href=http://www.affiliatecompany.com/category/product/mycode rel="nofollow">Check on product availability here!</a></B>

[SteveGerencser]

I'm assuming you left off the quotes on purpose??

<B><a href="http://www.affiliatecompany.com/category/product/mycode" rel="nofollow">Check on product availability here!</a></B>

[cz]

I forgot them Feydakin - I'm sorry about that. I'm going to edit the post. Thanks for catching it. I have them on in the website's links but missed them when trying to make my example.

I must be missing something - I can't edit the original post. Again, they're are like you have that one fixed in your reply. Thanks again!

[illmill]

What did you use to set up your webpage that has the links on it? Was it wordpress? If it was, then you'll probably need a plugin.

[seosean]

I don't know if I'm totally following this but I thought I would give it a shot with what I thought you're looking to do.

First off, nofollow is good to do on your affiliate links. But I would suggest a JavaScript link through to be absolutely sure that the affiliate link does not get any credit for being a link.

Now what it sounds like you are having a problem with is that the url you type in on your website/blog is being altered after you insert it. One solution to this which would also give you a nice URL for your visitors would be to use a url re-write mod (.htaccess) and redirect users to the affiliate page from one of your own pages.

Such as:
Affiliate page: http://www.affiliatecompany.com/category/product/mycode
Your page that redirects to affiliate: http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate/product

Now in your htaccess you would send all pages ^/affiliate/(*+)$ to a PHP page (maybe /affiliateredirect.php?product=$1) that would redirect the visitor to the correct affiliate page based off the product.

[cz]

Thanks for all of your kind replies and suggestions.

First, it's a Yahoo! store and second, I use Win XP Pro & IE6.0 sp2 (the shredder) and I wasn't seeing the code, for whatever the reason? (lot of possible variables there)

I finally got the company I was affiliating to, on the phone after 3 days and they said they were clicking on my links and the ID was displaying fine on their PC.

At this point the conversation took a turn for the worse and they had the b***s to say my links were no good and they wanted all of my images and text descriptions to link to their buy pages for the identical products. 556 links to be modified!

I politely said "I'll get started on my links right away." And I did - I took down the 12 trial links I was using, off the site and deleted my account with them.

The site makes enough money as it is, to keep it in business and in the interim, another distributor of many similar products that I don't carry, gave me 8 new product lines to affiliate with, at 3 x's the commission to boot.

All I have to do is create a new section and upload the the 8 logos of their product lines, (which are well known and different from mine) and write a brief pre-sell sentance or two under each image with my affiliate link in the text. It'll take about 1 1/2 hours to fully complete and optimize the one new section page and will only contain 8 OB affiliate links.

This'll be much better - similar products, made by different companies and at a wide spread in pricing, for my customers to pick and choose what's right for their wallet.

[cz]

Moilideoresse - wtf are you talking about? Go away plz.