Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website

Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website – Part 2

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

This series of articles looks at why pages with affiliate links could be punished by the search engines. I have already looked at why search engines might penalise sites with affiliate links in part 1, but what makes me think that this is happening?

This is not some basic conspiracy theory that I have dreamt up overnight. It is based upon years of experience with websites and affiliate selling. But a while ago I made a discovery that made be certain it is true.

I’ve already looked at why Google would penalise pages with affiliate links and I was interested in a discovery that I made a while ago when I set up a new website. It had a directory on it with links to a few suitable sites. All directory pages were made the same way and all had about the same amount of links and content. But a few pages I didn’t have websites ready to link to, so I filled them with affiliate links thinking I might as well make an income if I could!

So they should all have been equal. But I noticed after a Page Rank update that the Page Rank was not equally distributed across the pages. Some pages had PR2 whilst others were still grey bar. Strangely, in every case, the grey barred pages were the ones with affiliate links and those with ranks were without links.

In the remainder of the series I will 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.