Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website

Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website – Part 3

Filed in Auto, Discussion on Apr.01, 2010 By Keith Lunt

I believe that search engines could be punishing sites that have affiliate links. I have already looked at why search engines might penalise websites with affiliate links in part 1 and the evidence that makes me believe this in part 2. So next, what do we do to prevent the damage?

If, as I believe, search engines such as Google are punishing those pages that contain affiliate links, then what can we do to protect these web pages? I have already shown how one of my own sites lost page rank on those pages that contained affiliate links, whereas those pages without the affiliate links gained a better ranking.

So what do we do? Well, it is possible that the old rel=”nofollow” tag added into the links could stop the search engines from following the links, but I do not think that is enough. More about that in the last part of the series.

The best way seems to be a redirect from a page on your own website. This means that not only are all of your links pointing internally, but you can place that redirect file into a folder which is blocked from search engines by a robots.txt file. This way, the search engines will never know that the link on your page is pointing to an affiliate site.

Unfortunately, yes it does seem a bit dishonest. But is it worth taking the risk of lowering page rank across the site just so that you can fit in some advertising in the side bar?

In the last part of the series we will look at what could be the full reasoning behind such a move from the search engines.

Written by Keith Lunt, owner of http://www.janric.co.uk. If you missed any of the part of this series you can catch up with them on the blog.