Viglinks aim is spelled out in their home page meta title 'Affiliate Every Link On The Web With Viglink'. Their hook to website owners is "Unlock the power of your site's links and earn extra money from your site automatically, transparently and honestly.".
The idea is that you use a bit of javascript on your site, and then that instantly turns every link on your page into an affiliate link, letting you know if anyone from your site made a purchase on one of your linked sites.
Viglink has become a member of tonnes of affiliate networks across the web so that the commerce sites recognise a Viglink customer when they get one. If someone buys after using one of your links, Viglink will take a commission, but original signup is free, and non-exclusive.
Viglink won't go on those links you are already monetising, but just on those you haven't. For example, if you write a blog post mentioning a commerce site, (one of which you aren't an affiliate), Viglink will automatically add some script so that if anyone who clicks on that links buys on that commerce site, you get paid commission.
Google has given the program a clean bill of health (as it should, it is an investor), so webmasters don't need to worry about these 'paid' links being in any violation of Google rules.
The strange thing is though, if Viglink reached its goal of "Affiliate every link on the web", then;
- If Google continued to follow those links and give them authority, their own algorithm, heavily influenced by linking itself, could be skewed towards commercial linking opportunities (benefiting those site owners who have the most affiliate links to them).Or
- If they ignore those links, giving them no influence, any site with Viglink on it would never be able to 'recommend' any other site.
So it seems a strange kind of investment to me...unless Google has something up their sleeve regarding reducing the weight of links...
