affiliate links seo

stender · Mar 27, 2012

I have a new wp site which has some posts for example on book reviews and currently has no affiliate links and hasn't undergone any link building either.
Is there any detrimental effect on ranking adding in links to amazon for these books even if using pretty links? I am wondering whether to remain ad and affiliate free until getting traffic or add affiliate links in from the start?

Blossom · Mar 27, 2012

I personally find that affiliate links on new sites makes them dance. I have a suspicion it depends on the amount of content and non-affiliate links as well though.

stender · Mar 27, 2012

Thanks Blossom, I that including links done with something like pretty link or 301's as opposed to blatant links?

Edwin · Mar 27, 2012

You'll still get caught out by a manual review, but if you create links like this:
http://www.example.co.uk/l/nice-looking-link.html

and then disallow all robots in a robots.txt file in the /l/ directory (don't accidentally put it in root!), use a rel="nofollow" in all your affiliate links, and 301 nice-looking-link.html to the real, convoluted affiliate link you're probably as "clean" as you can be while still having affiliate links on the page.

peter_w · Mar 27, 2012

"Pretty" links are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly they just look nicer to the end user (some affiliate links are scary-looking), and secondly it means you can help direct Google away from following them.

The easiest way to do (not necessarily the best) pretty links is using a simple .htaccess rule:

redirect 301 /visit/amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/youraffiliatelinkhere
redirect 301 /visit/waterstones http://www.waterstones.co.uk/youraffiliatelink

And then in your robots.txt, add the following:

user-agent: *
disallow: /visit/

You might as well also add rel="nofollow" to the links, not that it will make much difference.

Tons of affiliate out there using this kind of method (perhaps not the .htaccess route, but same end result) and ranking perfectly well.

Edwin · Mar 27, 2012

Great minds, etc...

dazc · Mar 27, 2012

peter_w said:
"Pretty" links are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly they just look nicer to the end user (some affiliate links are scary-looking), and secondly it means you can help direct Google away from following them.

This is good practice for affiliate links in general. It's worth noting however that amazon's affiliate links are routed via a /gp/ directory which is disallowed in their own robots.txt so you don't really need to worry about using a regular aff link.

stender · Mar 27, 2012

I've always used the 301 redirect but about to play with the pretty link plugin for wp and wondered if it does the same job or are there extras i need to do.

So does concensus say add affiliate links in or et the site mature before doing so? the problem is it's a Wp site so the posts won't be current later on.

dazc · Mar 27, 2012

I've always used the 301 redirect but about to play with the pretty link plugin for wp and wondered if it does the same job or are there extras i need to do.

Dunno about this particular plug-in but generally you'll find the links going through a directory named /go/ or /out/ or /something like that/.
Just disallow whatever it is in robots.txt

So does concensus say add affiliate links in or et the site mature before doing so? the problem is it's a Wp site so the posts won't be current later on.

You'll get two kinds of answer to that question - the right answer and the wrong one. Just get on with it is what I say. (So long as your site has something other than a bunch of affiliate links.)

One thing you want to watch out for (or not, depending on how paranoid you are) is to keep checking what google is indexing because it's very likely they'll find all those /go/ links and index every one of them.
In theory this isn't going to hurt you but it does become a heck of a mess. So after a while you can go into webmaster tools and submit a removal request for the entire directory /go/.
It seems to work quite well and they don't come back.
They (google) say you shouldn't use this function for removing crud from the index but so long as they keep indexing my crud I'll keep removing it

retired_member21 · Mar 27, 2012

Not really SEO but if you use an /out/ or /go/ you can also track the clicks as opposed to relying on the affiliate network

As mentioned above - nofollow/robots.txt

/go/xyz
/product/123456

Totally agree with Blossom though - the more content the better - the percentage of original content vs affiliate/auto content is key IMO (in balancing out the affiliate links)