Affiliates with very few visitors do not bother about the quality of links. However, the high traffic website owners will be very sensitive out quality links and may never agree to put a poor quality link on their site even if you offer him a 100 percent commission. You must consider the following affiliate linking information before choosing your affiliate software. Do link-sensitive affiliates aggressively find links that will minimize the risk of losing their link credibility with Google?Usually, owners of professional websites are very link-conscious. They never put any link on any of their web pages if it goes against normal SEO best practices. There is valid reason for this; if the links violate Google's best practices, there is a good chance Google will penalize them. What Google (and other search engines) like are natural links, i.e., direct links to a page with relevant content. It mainly dislikes paid links or irrelevant links. If the links are redirected via another web page, Google may consider the link a paid link. If the redirect is via another website, the situation becomes worse. Unfortunately, all standard affiliate links are redirects by nature unless software makers take special care not to use this type of linking. Prospective mega affiliates will be choosy about the types of links used on their website. They have spent many years attaining their rankings on the search engines and they will not agree to lose their link credibility. If your affiliate software vendor can help you devise deep linking capability, or help you create natural links that go directly to the corresponding content pages, you will really have something with which to woo your prospective affiliates. Can brand-sensitive affiliates choose a link type that can hide his affiliation with your site from his own visitors?Websites with high traffic are normally brand-sensitive where their visitors are concerned. They may want to hide the fact that they are affiliates of relatively less popular websites. However, they may not mind placing a natural link on their site that hides the affiliation. There are going to be times that some prospects will refuse to refer any visitor from their website. You must have these website owners agree to become your affiliate because they have the traffic you want and need. One single high-traffic affiliate can sell one hundred times more than the average affiliate, so you don't want the quality of your link or promo to present an obstacle. Get together with your affiliate software vendor and see whether they have any solution for this. Think twice before buying software if it does not have the capacity to generate best practices linking. Can affiliates find the links they want easily?Let's say you have set up great links and banners, but your affiliate software does not make specific ones easy to find from the affiliate panel. This can cause all of your efforts to go to waste. It's even worse if you are selling a large number of products and want text links for each product. If your affiliate does not have an option to search for what he wants, it will be next to impossible to find what he wants from the 1,000 text links or more listed on a single page. The software you choose to purchase has to make it easy for your affiliates to find exactly the links they want for a specific product. Can affiliates define their own set of links?In the course of your affiliate marketing business, you will meet some very proactive affiliates. These are the experts. They like to define their own links relevant to their site or campaign. There is not enough time in a day to create all the promos and links per their instructions. However, these proactive affiliates, even if it's only one out of four, can bring in a lot of business. You want to have a way for them to define their own links. Affiliate-defined links are great solutions in this type of situation. These affiliates can create their own promo (text links/ banners) from the affiliate panel and use it just like any other link. Will the affiliates have the freedom of creating links on the spot and not have to copy from the affiliate panel? Serious affiliates will never like the idea of copying a link from an affiliate panel and pasting it on their websites. Although all third party affiliate software works on this assumption, it only works when someone places one or two links on their website. This does not work when affiliates want to place article links, say at one hundred different places distributed in different articles. To solve this problem the affiliate must have some sort of formula, say, just add aid=765 at the end of any link. Do you get maximum SEO benefits from the affiliate links?All affiliate links are external links. We know external links play a big role in Google's organic search ranking. It will be a big loss to you if Google does not treat your affiliate links as valid external links. There is a very good change that some affiliate software links will look like paid links to the web crawlers. This chance increases if redirected links are used and/or come from non-relevant web pages. The ideal link for optimum SEO is a natural link. Check with your affiliate software vendor to see if his software has options to avoid redirected links or additional query strings with any link. That way you can make a better decision when it's time to buy your software. | 
