Hello I am developing a large content site, where I will earn money by recommending affiliate links. I am optimizing the site for several keywords. I read that Google gives lower rankings to sites that have affiliate links, and they read id, hop, aff=, etc...) so it is best to hide the links from the SE's. Is this true or false? If it is true, do you have any suggestions on how to hide the links from the bots? Cheers! Ellen
Ellen, mine is a site similar to yours, I would guess, and I am utterly new to this, so take anything I say with a HUGE grain of salt - but I believe any attempt to hide links from Google will only do you more harm than good (in fact, doesn't Google say so on their policies for webmasters page - not there now, but recall something to the effect). IMHO, seems to me that while google may not like affiliate links, as long as the site is not about these only, and your site is growing in pages and content about something other than these links (and incoming links continue to grow), your site will look to be more and more to googlebot what it is - commercial, but substantive and informational as well. Just my thoughts. Paul
I am not sure about search engine rankings and affiliate links - I had a couple of pages that really did great without hiding. But I what I have done is to use a url re-directing script mainly for visitors. I think visitors can get turned off by using affiliate links.
I don't think you can be penalized for showing affilaite links on your site. As far as the SE's are concerned they may be links to simply track adverts or anything.
This is interesting - when I click on one of my affiliate links, I get a security warning from MSN - a couple of times, I presume when the click goes from the HREF to the Image source to the advertiser site - is what you are talking about a legit way to avoid this?
The only thing to be concerned with here is duplicate content. Preferably Google SHOULD see it as some sort of ID and filter it. Your other alternative is using something like LinkConnector's "Naked Links." Now THAT _is_ cool.
Either way I would ad rel=nofollow to the links to hold as much PR back for quaility links on the site.
Hi All, Bunch of different topics and issues in this great thread. 1) G and other engines do not penalize affiliate links per se - BUT they hate what has been termed "thin" affiliate sites. Site that have no unique content or value add - just a bunch of affiliate links. At WebMasterWorld, Matt Cutts from Google confirmed this. If your site is just an affiliate link farm and a human editeor from G reviews it you could get banned or penalized. 2) Dup content is a big issue. 3) CAREFUL trying to hide or cloak affiliate links. Sometimes you can make it so the links won't even track so you end up cutting off your nose to spite your face. Also its against the TOS in some programs to change the links in any way. 4) "I get a security warning from MSN - a couple of times." This can be a big problem if it's what I am thinking it is. If the merchants site OR the netowrk tracking server is not WC# complaint than it can create a security warning. THE REALLY BAD THING is the IE6 block cookies on site that are not compliant - so this could mean your cookies will not work and you won't get credit for the sales from this merchant.
This seems to be a problem with not just one, but with all of my affiliate links. I did do a sample W3C run on a couple of links, and, yep, those pages had errors which numbered in the hundreds. 5Star - can you please talk more - when you say network tracking server - is this their end, or my end? I do have friends who click the links, and they don't get any kind of a warning. The only time I get it is when I am using MSN browser to go to my site and click the affiliate links. It doesn't happen with me when I use Firefox. Are you saying that anytime anyone uses MSN or IE to access my site, likely, the security warning will come up, the cookies won't be placed, and I won't get the credit?