How this happen for amazon affiliate links

Hi,

if you go to this site http://top10supplements.com/top-10-fat-burners-for-men-in-2013/ and click on "Buy Now" under Amazon logo for the first product from top it goes to this url
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B006RUK4U8/top10supplements-20

but in view source that "Buy Now" image for the first product points to below url in the ahref

http://www.amazon.com/Dymatize-Nutr...833&sr=1-1&keywords=Dymatize+Dyma-Burn+Xtreme

this means the url is different for search engines and different for users which is known as cloaking I think. Is this legal to do? and how this site has done this?

Can anyone clarify this?

 

Yes the links are cloaked and yes it is allowed. See this post -

He is using a wordpress plugin. I've used pretty links plugin and never had an issue.

 

But is this good for google? I heard Matt Cutts in a video that any type of cloaking is against their policy.

 

Maybe if you're running adsense on the site I suppose but, I stopped using adsense years ago. I've been cloaking my links for over 5 years and it's never affected any of my sites.....so I could care less what matt cutts has to say. And considering how many sites are cloaking their links I don't think they care either.

 

and how many amazon affiliate links you place per page?

 

It depends, no more than 2 text links and any images that are on the page, usually no more than 3 pictures.

 

i have 2 text links pointing to amazon affiliate links and one buy button (image) which also points to amazon affiliate link so total 3 per page . This is on each page with 300-500 words content and my affiliate links are not cloaked. Is that ok in terms of google? or shall I cloak my affiliate links?

 

Also why cloaking may affect if have adsense ads? I do have 3 adsense ads as well per page.

 

Why you cloak links is determined by the webmaster's intentions. If the have bad intentions, and they are doing something they shouldn't they will cloak their links. But I would say the majority of webmasters cloak links because we would rather have our visitors see links like

http://www.example.com/go/some-supplements

instead of

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B006RUK4U8/top10supplements-20

Early on the thought was that some visitors were reluctant to click on amazon links, but now many people don't even cloak them anymore because amazon has become such a trusted brand on the web and they still get just as many clicks.

As far as google and adsense that was just a guess by me as to why google doesn't want you to have cloaked links. It was just a guess. Like I said earlier though, I could care less about them. Even when people do what they ask they still lose adsense accounts or lose serp rankings. I've gotten tired of jumping through their hoops and going through all their penguin/panda/donkey updates. It's not worth my time. There are plenty of other ways to get traffic to my sites. So I rely less and less on them.

 

other ways to get traffic cost money for advertising. Google organic is free traffic and most relevant and gives max conversion. If you dont spend on advertising than you will have to work hard to promote on social networking sites.

 

Anything you do takes hard work if you want it to be successful. Ask yourself what's your time worth? How much time do you put in finding quality backlinks...or finding places to guest post on...or writing good content for your sites? This is not a hobby or something I do on the side. This is my business and I treat it as such.

It never ceases to amaze me how people will pay for a domain, hosting, themes, ebooks, courses and other stuff, but are so unwilling to pay for the one thing the need to succeed.....TRAFFIC! Traffic is the life blood of any internet business. I don't care how good your content is, how pretty your theme is, if your traffic isn't converting whether by clicking ads, buying a product or filling a cpa form or whatever your site is monetized for you are destined to go nowhere slowly. Name one successful business that doesn't pay for advertising. Apple spends more than $120,000,000 (that's 120 million us dollars) per month just to run the itunes & the app store!

Spending money is a cost of doing business, without it you can't effectively grow. How can you grow when you let someone else control your business. I can see the fear in your posts in this thread. When google feels the need to do something for their business, it in some way or another screws over webmasters and site rankings. There goes your income...poof gone!

Just think, what if after googles next update your main site gets knocked back to page 10 for the keyword that was bringing you the most traffic or heaven forbid de-index your site. How much work will you have to put in just to recover? I'll be damned if I work as hard as I do, just to have that happen to my business.

Just realize that the money you're spending is money you're spending to grow your business!

 

if you do not trust google than it means you are not confident regarding SEO. If you do SEO correctly site is never penalized. One of my sites (not an affiliate site) is running for past 6 years and the traffic is still not gone down and the site never got penalized and I have been making a living from it for past 5 years. First time I am entering into affiliate site so just looking to learn more as there are some issues that more affiliate links on a given page can lower the ranking of this page in google. Else I am very much confident regarding SEO and how to build links. Just at the launch of the affiliate site and getting some links I started receiving good organic traffic from google but than I added some more amazon affiliate links to increase my conversion and my site got hit after that. I have many sites without affiliate links and they are doing well in google. So something is google frown on for putting more affiliate links. That is what I wanted to cofirm with other owners of amazon affiliate sites.

 

I do spend money where it helps to increase organic traffic like high quality content. I pay writers good so that they deliver high quality content. I dont mind paying yahoo directory for a link as it really pays off.

 

Hey hope2life I hope you didn't take that the wrong way. I have been doing seo for many years also and I've never had a site lose rankings ever. I'm more than confident in my seo skills That's great that you pay for quality content and some quality backlinks, it shows you're serious about your business. Personally I would rather pay for my traffic and spend more time optimizing my sites for better conversions or work on new projects than worry about what google could do to my income or traffic.

Exactly what I'm talking about. Your already missing out on potential income. No thanks.

Because no one knows googles algorithm it's always a guessing game as to whats going to happen next. I know people who've had their micro niche sites wiped out overnight and others that are still going strong. Some have sites that are full of affiliate links and adsense but they suffer no penalty's. It's just gotten to inconsistent and just because I've never been slapped before there is no guarantee I won't be in the future.


Every time the rumors of google's next update hits the web, I will never lose sleep wondering if I've been smacked or not. I worry about my servers going down or campaigns getting screwed up. That I can live with. Nothing like peace of mind

I'm not sure what you can do except cloak the links and see what happens. How many pages have the links on them? Maybe try them on just one page and see what happens? It might take some time to re-index the site if you don't update it often.

 

Almost forgot make sure the affiliate links are no-follow!

 

Already my affiliate links are no follow but still you will get penalized because of having more affiliate links because that is not user friendly. I am waiting for recrawling and reindexing and I am sure my site would recover lost traffic as I have removed extra affiliate links I added.

 

This is what upsets me about what you've had to do. You said earlier that you pay for good content so as a visitor to your site i'm sure I would like the content. Let's say that the cont is so good that you have persuaded me to by the product that your promoting and I feel comfortable enough to click one of your affiliate links to go and make a purchase. How is that not a good user experience? To me, that shows that you're giving visitors such a good experience that you could even make a commission from it.

I guess you could try amazon banners or widgets but, these are far less effective than text links.

 

Some amazon affiliates don't even write product description when they make a site. They simply put pictures and write the product name of various amazon products on a single page and make these pictures and product name clickable to send them to their affiliate link. They think they will get the site higher just through backlinks. That is the reason google frown on when they see lot of affiliate links on a single page. That is where there is no user friendliness and because of those spammers good sites also suffer sometimes.

 

So true! As soon as people find something that works they share it on there blog or forums with good intentions to help others but, spammers run with it and spam the crap out of it and forces google into making changes that hurt legitimate sites.

I think because some people want "the money" so bad they are always looking for shortcuts or the next big thing to get their sites high in the serps. They don't realize that those things are short term and they need patience to do it the right way such as yourself.

Here's a guy that had the same thing happen him concerning amazon links. You should check it out -
http://www.nichepursuits.com/how-to-get-a-google-penalty-using-affiliate-links-and-how-to-recover/

 

yes this tells all the story.