Here at The WebMarketing Group we keep our ears to the ground and track breaking search issues that can affect the reach of online marketing. We track changes so that we are able to enhance online visibility. Something new on the horizon in the affiliate marketing world is ‘Skimlinks’.
What is ‘Skimlinks’?
In short, Skimlinks is an affiliate program launched to allow online publishers to readily monetise web copy and content. Skimlinks consists of a technology that is installed on the site by the publisher. Every linkable asset on the site, including articles and posts can be automatically turned into a Skimlinks affiliate advertisers link.
This allows publishers to earn commission effortlessly and negates the need for time consuming administration – webmasters can simply identify their favourite advertising niche using the Skimkit dashboard and publish their site’s content and linkable assets accordingly.
How do Skimlinks affect SEO?
Little has been discussed on the rel="noskim" command in the SEO community, the most important and pertinent issue is whether rel="noskim" is beneficial or detrimental to SEO link building objectives.
When you find an instance of Skimlinks installed on a publisher’s site – click the affiliate link…to the naked eye these links act and behave exactly as a normal link would and appear to be laden with the SEO elixir of life – an apparent direct link that adds authority and relevance to a site. What actually occurs (and often remains undetected) is a lightning fast redirect measuring milliseconds!
“Skimlinks lets the normal link appear, and turns it into an affiliate link only when the user clicks through, so there is no visible difference to the user. This gives users more trust in your site, and increases the likelihood they will click on the link."Source: Skimlinks FAQ
This is the distinguishing factor that separates this particular affiliate program from many others. Whilst affiliate programs enhance referrals and can help boost traffic results – SEO link builders with organic search in mind should be cautious to act within this territory.
As Google suggests in Webmaster Central, direct links endorsed from relevant and authoritative sites pass quality SEO juice to aid a website’s search rankings. Whilst common forms of redirect and nofollow links all support the overall link profile of a link building campaign – these link types are not considered a viable asset to boost overall organic search rankings directly - the exemption to this being the 301 redirect. The 301 redirect is considered to actually pass pagerank. However, according to Matt Cutts, the head of the spam team at Google - a 301 still loses an incremental amount of juice along the way.
The benefits of redirect links are often debated amongst many SEO communities.
Implications of linking on sites that use rel="noskim"
You notice the recent acquisition on that great site might appears to use the magnificent rel="noskim". As discussed below this command is used to differentiate a link from an affiliate link. This is not to say that there will never be any further repercussions or negative impact as adirect result. From an SEO point of view - what could be the implications be?
On closer inspection, it is still evident that the redirect occurs on these ‘trustworthy’ links. This is only visible after several attempts of clicking the link in question whereby something like: http://redirectingat.com/?id=2576X586144&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkablesiteurl.com%2Froses&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F will suddenly appear in the status bar.
Even if there was a work around solution to this, it begs the question - would you really want your link to be situated among this neighbourhood? A vast array of blatantly ‘paid for’ affiliate links? What would be your opinion?
How to spot a site using Skimlinks - Rel="noskim"
Unless your eyes are rigged up with a bionic timelapse camera, the Skimlinks redirect is (initially) totally invisible. Only the most scrupulous of internet marketers will spot this - as our in-house SEO team do daily at The WebMarketing Group.
You can only really spot Skimlinks in action whilst viewing a web page’s source code.
A common indication that a site uses Skimlinks is the rel="noskim" tag.
This tag is found in your uploaded HTML link markup. Online publishers can use the rel="noskim" tag to manually differentiate the usual affiliate ‘paid’ links with ‘friends’ or ‘endorsed’ links on the site.
Be aware that this will tag will not stop the referencing of the javascript file that initiates the redirect. Here is an illustrative example of how the javascript and link code actually exists:
<a rel="noskim" href="http://www.example.com>skimlinks-example</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com.skimlinks.com/api/skimlinks.js<view-source:http://example.com.skimlinks.com/api/skimlinks.js>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var skimlinks_pub_id = ' XXXXXXXXXX';
var skimlinks_exrel = 'noskim';
skimlinks();
</script>
To summarise:
Whilst rel="noskim" provides one way to identify Skimlinks usage, this is only a webmaster's preference. The only sure fire way of identifying a site using skimlinks is by pressing ‘Ctrl + F’ in the source code and searching for "skimlinks" inside the javascript. This being said, webmasters using Skimlinks can opt to only use this program on targeted and specific areas of their site. This could make it even harder for a link builder to detect.
Here at
The WebMarketing Group we are tracking this development and will be future testing the effects of Skimlinks on the SERPS using experimental sites.
We will report back soon more fully on the good, the bad and the ugly side of Skimlinks.
Tagged with :