Affiliate backlinks with 301 redirect not displaying in Webmaster Tools

reno_rita

I have an affiliate program that is hosted on a different site and server. It is an eCommerce site that accepts payments for my products. So all my affiliate links are pointing to this eCommerce site and then subsequently 301 redirected to my site. The route is "link->eCommerce->301->my site". I read that it's okay for ranking and Google considers this as a backlink to my site (correct me if I am wrong). However I don't see these links in my...

Originally asked by user3020003 on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

From Google's help document about links to your site in webmaster tools : Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal. I've seen many webmasters complaining about how incomplete this data is. Googlebot does follow links through 301 redirects and even passes Pagerank across them. Links through 301 redirect should show up in the link report according to their help document: Link counts now include links redirected using 301 or 302 redirects. When links don't show up, it is probably worth doing a little more investigating. You may want to check the following: Is anything in the path blocked by robots.txt . Either the place where the link is located, or the URL that does the 301...

Full answer by Stephen Ostermiller: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/55738 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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