Affiliate Links

I am about to try a hotel affiliate program (Hotels Combined) on a travel site of mine as an alternative to Adsense.

What's Googles take on affiliate links? Should I be masking it somehow?

Thanks,
Matt

 

Generally not a good idea to let them be seen where possible, either use a plugin or use your htaccess and robots.txt effectively.

Basic example would be to add 301 to your htaccess like below as well as adding nofollow to the actual link to the URL In the page its self:

Code:

Redirect 301 /goto/vendor1.php http://www.yourafflink.com/?fkr4u

If you keep your redirects allthe same folder name like "/goto/" it makes it nice an short to add something like this your robots.txt :

Code:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /goto/

Its not only search engines you need to be concerned about, many ad-blockers have issues with affiliate links too and remove them or remove their id strings.

 

This is just conjecture on my part so take it with a pinch of salt

I think affiliate links are probably part of what google looks for when it comes to flagging up spam (obviously not all they look for, legitimate sites have affiliate links too), it's one box they can tick to class you as spam, so you don't want your site ticking any more negative boxes.

Are you confident the rest of your site doesn't tick any more negative boxes? thin/duplicate content, bad links? etc

A content site with some affiliate links, fine

A affiliate site with some content, no good.

 

Make sure you nofollow the links.

There are some SEO concerns about cloaking affiliate links, but if you nofollow them, it becomes clear that you're cloaking for the visual look of the link and to add analytics to clicks, rather than anything Google should dislike.

 

Pretty Link works a charm for Wordpress.

 

second that, the pro version is very good and will do everything you need and more!