How to handle affiliates.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: I like this question by +Jenny Halasz over at the Technical SEO community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/115406093786292678263) about how to handle affiliates that are doing blackhat tactics given their legal limitations, thought it would be a good one for us to think about?
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  Jim Munro: It is an interesting question (and some interesting responses). ;
  
  I'd like to ;know some of the methods +Jenny Halasz ;is referring to.
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  Jenny Halasz: Hi Gentlemen, I just came across this discussion and wanted to contribute. This was actually a very interesting situation that taught me that a lot of commonly held beliefs about how redirects, affiliates, and error pages/robots exclusions work are incorrect. I`m motivated to write a post about it on searchengineland now, so look for that next week. :) A few key things: 1. Affiliate links do pass PR. Google doesn`t automatically discount them. 2. All types of redirects pass PR when considering penalty behavior. 302, 303, 301, doesn`t matter. John Mueller confirmed this. 3. Noindex/robots.txt don`t stop the passing of PR.Also confirmed by John. This all started with a manual action for unnatural links for my client. They`re in a high volume, heavily spam oriented industry. Not porn, but think along those lines. We asked the affiliates to add nofollow, most of them did. There were still some rogue ones that we couldn`t control. We couldn`t kick them out of the program for two reasons: first, there was legal language that prevented this, second, it`s a significant revenue stream and there`s a reputation issue to consider. The types of spam the affiliates were engaging in were the most egregious I`ve ever seen: in link redirects, hacking sites to insert links, and squatting on expired sites like for children, fire stations, land mine victims... it was bad. And trying to keep up with it via disavow or direct contact with affiliates was like playing whack a mole. What we ended up doing, after John Mueller confirmed it would work, was changing the affiliate landing page to be a 410. But a custom 410 so that customers that arrived on that page thought it was just a home page. This worked, and the client`s manual penalty was lifted in early February. More on my post, but I hope this followup is helpful. :)
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  Jim Munro: Hi Jenny thank you for your input. Would you like to join us on a forthcoming Dumb SEO Questions Hangout to discuss your conclusions. The outcome was beyond dispute, good job, but there is a question mark over points one and two above.
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  Jenny Halasz: Hi Jim, I`d love to join you to discuss this situation. By the way, my post on SEL is now live at http://searchengineland.com/manual-spam-action-revoked-case-study-186349 Ping me on G+ and we can set it up! Jenny