Hello, I would like to know if I use affiliate links on my site if Google will penalize me? I don't want to REL=â€nofollow“ the affiliate links because in my opinion what it will do is not pass any 'votes' and it will also question the integrity of a site that does not trust any of it's own content... I know I can do a redirect on an html page to get it to work. I also know that I can edit the .hta file and do Redirect temp /affiliate_name http://affiliate.com/aff-id?=1234 replacing affiliate_name with text of my site and http://affiliate.com/aff-id?=1234 with my affiliate url. Then the url would be http://mysite.com/affiliate-page But I want to know in your opinion if I should do any of this? I have over fifty pages on UNIQUE content and adding four pages more a day of unique content. I also have articles wrote separate from my site and submitted to enzine articles, and places. So Google will not see lots of affiliate links and no content. I only have two affiliate links on each of the fifty pages of content. Thanks for any help and your time,
Are you worried that your site might get de-indexed by google for putting up affiliate links...is it? That is highly unlikely. Google is not known to impose penalty for promoting business at your own site. There is these two main reason why people build sites.....to spread out information and to make money..... If it started penalizing such sites, more than half of the sites all over the web will have to be de-indexed! Regards, RightMan
It depends on the number of affiliate links and the nature. If you're only using two links then there won't be a problem, however, if you had 100 websites all inter-linking, then this would be construed as a domain farm and penalties could then apply. Secondly, site-wide links (especially in the footer) should be avoided too.
I got penalized with one of my sites, but the difference is that EVERY link (except navigation) were affiliate links So I had a filter that reduced my traffic and rankings hahaha However, in your case, you're almost a saint no risk !!
Hello, and thank you all for replying and your help. Actually kinda both. I submitted my sitemap to Google and they indexed every single page that I submitted which I was happy about. The thing that I am worried about is getting a PR rank penalty, or having my pr rank pass through the affiliate site through my links. I don't want Google to think. "This guy is an affiliate site and we will knock a couple of PR points off him, or not make him rank as well as he should because he is an affiliate site." I hope they don't do that. That's why I am willing to try one of the above methods if they do.
There is no risk for that with only a few affiliate links To prevent your PR juice to go to affiliate sites, just give them the rel="nofollow" attribute
I have over fifty pages of content, and on each page is two affiliate links. Now I have four different affiliate links one for each product, and I have four sections. So on the first section I have lets say 15 articles at the moment, and on each of those pages there are two affiliate links. so 15x2=30 of the same link granted there are only two for each page. Which would mean "15 articles x4 sections=60 total pages x two links = 120 total affiliate links = im worried lol.
Of course rankings will pass through your affiliate links since you are not using the nofollow tag, but this doesn't mean you will get a penalty. Before the existence of nofollow, I have had many affiliate links, much more than 2/a page and there was no any penalty problem, except the passing rankings. I don't think adding the nofollow tag will reduce the trust of your visitors in your site content. All my sites are currently using the tag for the affiliate links and no issues at all. Plus most of the people do not have addons to spot the tag, unless your niche is IT/SEO/IM/WebDesign... Also in my opinion, placing G. ads on an unique content site is the same, even worse (in the eyes of the visitors) than the affiliate links. Yes, my sites are affiliate sites, what about it? Everything (links and content) is absolutely related and nofollow'ed so they don't decide that I am selling these links. Simply that's the way I prefer to earn, instead of ads!
Thanks for the tip. I actually made custom graphics that the user would click on to take them to the correct page, and I didn't want my graphics to look like ads so much but pages rather. I even talked the affiliate company to co-brand with me and they let me put my logo on the page the consumer goes to. For me it's more professional that way, and if you have an affiliate I waould talk to them about that. The least they can so is no. The other thing they are willing to do is let me put the page the user would go to on my site using an iframe, and I can take there logo off doing it that way which I could use a noindex on those pages, and tell robots.txt to not index them. I am thinking about that next. In my opinion your website speaks to Google in a kinda way. So if I use nofollow I am saying to trust my content but don't trust my affiliate and pass rank though there site. A lot of people would deny this and I would like to do some more testing to be sure about this opinion. For now I don't want Google to consider me as an affiliate site but rather a site that is useful to people and has good content, and I happen to have affiliate links. I just looked at my site and I have a total of five affiliate links per page two are the same and three are different. meaning 5x60=300 total affiliate links. Now i'm really worried lol.
Don't worry that much about google, worry about your visitors. Google will has no issues with your site as long as the links on it are somehow related to your content in both cases do- or nofollow. As for the affiliate implementation the frames and logos are good idea. I have most of my sites well implemented so when a visitor click on an affiliate link he goes on the affiliate site, but the site template is actually that from my site - only the URL is different there. Unfortunately, not so many aff. programs offer such kind of implementation...
Thanks for all your help. Yea all the affiliate links are defiantly related to my content, and even have the related name of the section people are looking at in the link. Lately It seems like PR is not that big of a deal so I guess I'll just go with the flow, and if a problem should arise in the future I will take it on then. Thanks for all your help guys.
Matt Cutts, who is one of the managers in Googles webspam division posted an article on his blog about paid links. He stated that links to affiliate sites are not counted as paid links. There is very little to nothing to worry about when it comes to affiliate links. But if you want to, go ahead and use the nofollow tag.
I dont think that more afiiliate links on your site can be reason to any panalties for you site . But If you want feel safe use nofollow tags for your links.
I've struggled with sites that had plenty of 'normal' affiliate links, but on my other sites where I have no-followed them and have them going through an ourbound redirect php script, I've had no issues.