Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website

Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website – Part 1

Filed in Discussion on Mar.31, 2010 By Keith Lunt

Many people are using affiliate schemes to make a little extra money from their websites. But could these links be damaging to your website? In this series of articles we will look at why they could be damaging, what evidence there is for this and what you could be doing to protect your website.

First, why could there be a problem with having affiliate links in a website? Well, I do not think that the damage affects the entire site, just the pages with the links on, but I will go in to that more when I show you my evidence.

But we do know that Google and other search engines do not want to present to their visitors page after page of results that are actually all the same. Their aim is that whatever you search for, the second and third search results are not in effect showing the same as the first result did.

And this is the problem with affiliate products. It is a way of filling search engine results with the same product from the same supplier time after time. So if you search on Acme Widgets, then you could end up with a page of the widgets all from the same shop. This is not the level of choice that the search engines want to provide.

In the remainder of the series I will show you the evidence of what happened to one of my own websites with affiliate links and show you the tricks that I am now using to protect my websites from any damage that these affiliate links could be causing.

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.