Not sure if this belongs here or in Affilliate Programs -- Forgive me if its wrong. My question isnt about affilliate programs directly, its about site construction and SEO of a site with alot of affilliate content. What im doing is building a site that has alot of original content AND affillate content. Some pages will be 90% original content and 1 or 2 affilliate links, other pages will be 90% affilliate content. Should I hide the affilliate content pages from google and yahoo via robots.txt?
Only those that aren't adding any value compared with the exact same affiliate pitch next door. Or even better, add value and don't block them so you have increased pagecount, increased sales potential and increased user experience.
Joey, I wouldn't hide the content pages. I would mask any direct links you have to the affiliate though. For example: You are using Amazon. Rather than linking directly to Amazon with a url, I would create a "more-info.php" file that passes the Amazon product id, like "more-info.php?prod=B0002A6YVC" that then forwards the user to the affiliate link. Then in your robots.txt, add a line to exclude more-info.php This masks any outgoing affiliate links and prevents SE's that follow the robots.txt standard from following the link.