Internet Marketing:

...is the practice of using all facets of internet advertising to generate a response from your audience. It ties together both the creative and technical aspects of the internet, including design, development, advertising and marketing. Internet Marketing methods include search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, and interactive advertising.

Reader Rescue: Are my affiliate links preventing my site ranking higher?

Frequently Asked QuestionsToday’s question is from Carol, who writes:

I’ve heard that too many affiliate links are a problem with page ranking, but my site requires this. My site is a booklist, and all the books are linked to Amazon (primarily) so that readers can access more information, the picture of the front cover, sample pages, etc. I have noticed that the pages with the books and all the affiliate links don’t get much attention from Google, but my other pages without these links get much more search engine traffic.

Are these links getting in the way of a higher page ranking for me? Would it help to add a “nofollow” robots meta tag on these pages?

Thanks,
Carol

Hi Carol

The type of affiliate links most people have problems with are affiliate URLs that are tripping up robots or those that are creating duplicate content for a site. For example, if I offer an affiliate program for my product at www.site.com/product/ and then all my affiliates are linking to it using their affiliate id e.g. www.site.com/product/aff.cgi?2014, then in the eyes of the search engines, that is creating multiple versions of the same page. In this case, search engines will usually try to determine the most authoritative version of the page and sometimes they will choose an affiliate’s version instead of the official site.

In your case, you are simply linking out to Amazon using your affiliate link. It’s a question of usability: do your links make your site more usable to visitors? More than likely. You should always put the usability of your site and your visitor’s interests first. Provided you consult Google’s Webmaster Help while doing so, you really can’t go wrong.

However, if the number of external links on a single page are excessive or all pointing to the same external site, it may trip a suppression filter. So it’s probably best you use rel=”nofollow” on each link so you aren’t diluting your site’s ranking potential. See this interview of Matt Cutts by Rand Fishkin to learn more about the benefits of using “nofollow”.

Kalena

Got a web site problem? A question about search engines? Email me via kjordan[at]sitepronews.com with “Reader Rescue” in your subject line and I’ll do my best to answer it here.

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