Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Wilson Internet Rocklin, CA
Editor: I’ve long encouraged merchants to have affiliate links point to their domains to raise PageRank for the site. But the situation isn’t so clear these days. Here is an excerpt from my Report on Affiliate Management Software 2005. You’ll see the complexity – some of this is quite technical. But it is vitally important for merchants using affiliate programs to understand it. More detail is found in the Report itself.
In the last several years merchants have become savvy about search engine optimization (SEO). A site’s rank in the search engines — for a small company site, at least — can be significantly elevated by obtaining more incoming links to the website. An affiliate program is an effective way to do this — but only if the affiliate links themselves actually point to your domain.
Article continued at http://www.wilsonweb.com/art/ads/affiliate_links.htm