Matt Cutts confirms too many affiliate links can get your pages dropped from Google

[BigB]

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See deano6410's thread in the Google forum:
http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=43778

and Matt Cutts' blog post and comments:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

Other linking issues that can prevent your site being fully crawled (and result in dropped pages):

Too many spammy inbound links
Too high a proportion of reciprocal links
Too many non relevant outbound links

Thought this was important enough for a heads up here

[Rich]

Thats not quite what he said.

Somebody wrote about a “favorites” site that sells T-shirts. The site had about 100 pages, and now Google is showing about five pages. Looking at the site, the first problem that I see is that only 1-2 domains have any links at all to you. The person said that every page has original content, but every link that I clicked was an affiliate link that went to the site that actually sold the T-shirts. And the snippet of text that I happened to grab was also taken from the site that actually sold the T-shirts. The site has a blog, which I’d normally recommend as a good way to get links, but every link on the blog is just an affiliate link. The first several posts didn’t even have any text, and when I found an entry that did, it was copied from somewhere else. So I don’t think that the drop in indexed pages for this domain necessarily points to an issue on Google’s side. The question I’d be asking is why anyone would choose your “favourites” site instead of going directly to the site that sells T-shirts?

I don't think the fact that they were affilaite links was the problem, it was that the domain was just a doorway site to the other (merchants) site and had no original content.

[BigB]

Sorry, Matt Cutts confirms that too much duplicate content and too many affiliate links can get your pages dropped from Google.

Actually, it's the rest of the stuff on inbound links and outbound links that's more newsworthy.

And the new mechanism - no penalties as such - just less crawling and fewer pages in the index

- same result, though.

[Mogga]

Hvaing tried to use google extensively over the last two days I can confirm that the results are pretty shonky but the ads are spot on.

Cynical? Moi?

[Rich]

Sorry, Matt Cutts confirms that too much duplicate content and too many affiliate links can get your pages dropped from Google.

Ok, can you point me to where he says about affilaite links?

[Flightmapping]

Mogga,

I'm certainly getting some very odd rankings atm. I thought we'd got rid of most of our Google offending practices, but I'd say about 1/3 of our target search terms have dropped out of the top 30 SERPS.

However, unlike previous shake-ups, we're not noticing that much of a drop in traffic, so maybe people are going elsewhere to search when this happens.

I haven't had the chance to fully investigate what's going on, but just wondered if anyone else had seen changes in their own site's SERPS lately (as of Tues pm)?

[deano6410]

For the record I didnt mention anything about affiliate links having an effect on rankings. My point was that overuse of reciprocal linking will have a negative effect as will links pages, directories and partner pages.

[OLBG]

I dont think Google have any problem with affiliates links - people just get confused because often sites with lots of affiliate links have lots of duplicate content or at least little valueable unique content.

I also dont think google have a problem with link exchanges if they are on topic - after all its just good business sense to swap links with some sites. At worst they give no benefit (for search engines anyway)

[deano6410]

I also dont think google have a problem with link exchanges if they are on topic - after all its just good business sense to swap links with some sites. At worst they give no benefit (for search engines anyway)

I agree that you are NOT going to have any negative effect from relevent link exchanges. However, in the past link swapping has always been a great way to boost your rankings. Now google is saying that it is heavily de-valuing recip links.
Therefore sites that are currently ranking well because of a large amount of link trades are likely to see a major drop in the coming months.

[breathe]

I thought I'd add some quotes from Matt Cutts that you might find interesting if you read between the lines.

Matt Cutts quote
"After looking at the example sites, I could tell the issue in a few minutes. The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling."

Matt Cutts
"The first was one that I mentioned, where we didn’t index pages from sites with less trusted links"

Hmm lots of talk about trust here

Matt Cutts
"And if you’ve got an affiliate site, it makes sense to think about the amount of value-add that your site provides; you want to provide a reason why users would prefer your site."

And a reason for google to index you! They want to supply good user experience not just because their nice chaps but because that how they intend to remain the market leader for search functions on the web.

Matt Cutts
"Seems like a good time to throw in a link to my disclaimer right here to remind people that this is my personal take."

I find it interesting that google allow Matt to have his personal "take" they don't like people talking about how their technology works as this leads to people abusing it.

Oh well just another google mystery

[BigB]

Rich quoted a bit about affiliate links in the second post in this thread.

Matt Cutts talks about the proportion of "high quality" links. So if you have a high proportion of inbound links that are bought or reciprocal, and a high proportion of outbound links that are affiliate links or non relevant links, then you may not be crawled as deeply, and pages may drop out of the index, or not get into the index in the first place.

It's not about where pages rank, it's about whether they get indexed at all.