GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 35 - June 2016

All about those links, ’bout those links, no-follow Affiliate links to operator sites may make it more difficult for operators to maximize their own SEO strategies. by Martin McGarry A s an SEO advocate, you may find yourself stuck between the rock and the hard place of commercial strategy vs. search optimization objectives. One particular topic comes up repeatedly, especially within the affiliate arena: links! Links are the linchpins of the SEO business and the affiliate industry. Behind every af- filiate banner there is an outbound link; webmasters send visitors to external sites via tracking links; sites navigate custom- ers to their money pages via internal links; and we all do our best to acquire inbound backlinks to enhance our search-ranking position. At WhichBingo, we regularly carry out the customary technical SEO checks on our site, and one issue crops up every time — outbound links! This is one occupational hazard you just have to accept. As businesses and as affiliates, we all do our best to balance the affiliate agenda with search optimization principles. But do we ever consider who sits on the receiving end of our copious outbound links? Are af- filiate website owners insightful enough to no-follow or even consolidate links through an outbound management system? As SEO- oriented webmasters, we know that links provide scope for ranking opportunities, but they can also negatively impact rank. We recently researched the online bingo arena for our annual bingo report and dis- covered some interesting linking conun- drums, mainly attributed to affiliate links pointing to brand sites. Focusing entirely on the U.K. online bingo market, we un- earthed a remarkable trend: The most note- worthy bingo sites often have inadequate search presence and low SERP visibility. These popular sites struggle to rank for re- lated transactional search queries other than their own brand names — the kind of terms that customers use to research and window shop. These search queries lead to sales and, in our case, new acquisitions and first-time depositors (FTDs). Leading bingo sites attract a vast amount of interest from affiliate marketers, because ev- ery bingo blogger is looking to take advan- tage of their popularity: It makes sense to advertise the major players in this business. But therein lies the problem — hundreds, if not thousands, of small website operators sign up for affiliate accounts, and the links start to flood in. We profiled online bingo search data and grouped our results into two areas: the most popular by brand searches, and the most organically visible brands for transactional queries. The lists were almost entirely dif- ferent, with just two or three websites cross- ing over into both segments. But the most alarming outcome was the revelation that the most popular brands struggle to rank for generic search terms. Less popular sites ap- parently have a better handle on basic SEO principles — or could there be another factor underpinning their struggles in the SERPs? Is it simply that these bigger brands feel they 27 All about those links, ’bout those links, no-follow