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Reply With QuoteYeah I have tried it as a matter of course as it cant do any harm.
To be honest though there is no way for me to tell if its actually doing anything at all.
Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam
Is anyone adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to affiliate's banners and text links to try to get back Google page-rank, or to ensure that their page rank stays high ?
Yeah I have tried it as a matter of course as it cant do any harm.
To be honest though there is no way for me to tell if its actually doing anything at all.
I use rel=nofollow all the time. Primarily on any link which will send a bot into a black hole of redirects or to a page which I don't want cached.
you dont need to put no follow on affiliate links --- google are only after sites that sell links where the buyers intent is to rank higher as a result.
Affiliate links do not have that intent, not to mention regular affiliate links do not pass page rank anyway. Even if they did - I would argue that an affiliate link is editorial.
Dont be fearing google so bad. Just dont sell text links!
Pagerank is distrbuted through links within a website in relation to the links coming in to the page. No follow says to google that you do not trust this link therefor Pagerank is not released through that link.
What this means is that not using nofollow on aff links will benefit the merchant as they will most likely have a 301 redirect which will pass the PR on.
Nofollow can also work well when SEO'ing a website as it allows you to send weight (pr) to important, relative pages and ignore those that are not relevant, this of course works well when your trying to optimise your site and rank for more keywords.
An example would be;
I have a website on widgets(reviews, news, deals, offers) on my page reviewing a specific blue widget i also have links to all these other sections plus some individual entry posts (thinking of wordpress users here. like recent comments / popular posts.)
What i would do is nofollow every link that was not related to any reviews or anything 'Blue Widget' (excluding your main menu - im testing this) And make sure every post is like this in it's particular subject.
What this allows you to do is funnel PR to important pages inwhich you want to rank good for and not spread your pagerank to other pages inwhich you don't (ie. categories, the about page.)
It's better to rank top 7 for a couple high searched keywords rather than on the 4th page for 100 keywords.
One advantage in using the nofollow is to avoid the penalty a site is given if a link is of low quality i.e. the page you are linking to then does a redirect to another page. SEs do not like going round in circles (a page linking to itself) and they do not like redirects.
Not all bots respect the nofollow tag. Maybe more will use it in the future. I look forward to the day when my logs are not filled with bots going round in circles.
I am sure that the affiliate sites appreciate not having bots following thousands of links that send the bots off on redirects.
Be kind to servers. Too much bot traffic makes the server slow for human visitors.
Yeah you need to think more about Googles unwritten rules...
There can be such a thing as abusing the no follow tag... known as 'silo-ing'.
Imagine what a googlebot thinks when you no follow pages on your own domain.
"Hmmm... this website doesn't trust its own pages..."
If you're adding a no follow to every affiliate link in your main content too, what would googlebot think about your content?
"Hmmm... lots of content but this site doesn't trust any of the sites its linking too"
The no follow tag should be used wisely - for obvious pages you do not want or need indexed such as customer log in pages etc, and the infamous paid links.
Hi all
I am just searching through the endlesss useful posts in the forum and think this thread would be the best place to ask the following...
Should I restict google from spidering my affiliate links via robots.txt, use rel=nofollow or just let goolgle see that I am linking to shops that sell Widgets and these are indeed relevent?
Cheers in advance.
Leave them be. As long as your not selling dodgy text links in footers and sidebars you're ok!Originally Posted by geordieGeek
An affiliate link is not a paid link!
Google understands affiliate marketing as a business model and is not going to frown at you for linking to an affiliate product. Why would it? It's not hurting them. Affilaite links cannot help rank the merchants 99% of the time... and even if it does... an affiliate link is editorial. You're not getting paid to put the link there for the purpose of helping rankings for the merchant... which is all Google should care about.
Who, what and how we link to anyone is completely up to us. They are our sites. Google should just be very clever and detect paid links that artificially alter the results. Affiliate links are not doing anything to the search results - they are not seo friendly.
The reason I asked was because I currently redirect my widget products affiliate links via a buy_product.asp?product=widget1 style page which performs the affiliate link look up behind the scenes, sending the user to the new site via a redirect and wasn't sure if this was the most SEO friendly was of doing this?
Curently all my sites restrict Google and other search engines from accessing said buy_product.asp but looking at my Google webmaster / sitemaps area it got me thinkng that if I didn't restrict these 1000's of outgoing links to relevent web page I might get a boost?
Might be a case of if it aint broke don't fix it!
I am in the same boat as geordieGeek. On my website, I send all my affilate links to a redirect page, which then (eventually will) redirects to the appropriate page on the vendor site.
I am doing this, so I can do some internal tracking, on what pages people click on the 'rent now' link, as if you look at my sig, i am try to rent skis in Whistler.
I have been told, that SE don't link links on your site, that go to a internal page only to get redirected to another domain, is this so? and if so, should i rel="nofollow" all my 'rent now' links?
thanks all
Search engines don't like links that lead to redirects. Most affiliate links go through a few redirects before you get to the merchant site. So do what you can to stop the bots from following the links. The easy option is to have all your affiliate redirects in a 'link' directory and disallow all bots from this directory. For those bots that ignore the robots.txt file, add a robots meta tag with 'nofollow' to the redirecting page/s.
There is a different argument it you are deep linking direct to the merchant site - here I would want to get the relevance boost to my site so would not block the bots from following the link.
Whether your deeplinking or not, an affiliate link is an affiliate link and still has to do the same thing. 99% are not seo friendly... meaning it wont improve your rankings or anyone elses.
Just because a link looks like this: www.merchant.com/youid - doesnt mean its seo friendly, it's just a nice looking link.
99% of the time it will still have to redirect to all the same gumf a link like this: http://www.affiliatenetwork.com/redi...=27773&tid=eee
Most networks and merchants do not have seo friendly links set up, meaning that the affiiate link whatever it is - nice or ugly - will not count as an incoming link. Because of the necessary redirects, its not possible in most cases.
I know of only one network (link connector) and one inhouse solution (idev) for merchants that have the technology to turn affiliate links into real incoming links.
All UK networks as far as I'm aware don't, and the biggies in the US don't either (CJ etc).
The affiliate links only have about 2 redirections maximum, so the search engines wont have a problem at all following them, but that still doesn't mean they'll get counted as "real" links.
You're all looking too far into this. It really doesn't matter if you put a nofollow on or not, use your own judgement. It's not going to do much for you either way.
If you're afraid that bots will get lost in your outgoing links, meaning lots of redirects etc, then go for it put a condom on.
If you think that google will punish you for being an affiliate, put a condom on.
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