Should i nofollow amazon affiliate links

Should affiliate links be given the nofollow attribute for SEO? Should you put a no-follow attribute on Amazon Affiliate links? Why your rewardStyle affiliate links should be nofollow Nofollow affiliate links SEO Moz Should affiliate links be nofollow?

Affiliate Links Google Penalty Dofollow vs nofollow for affiliate links — Get Started — SitePoint Amazon Affiliate Links — Should they be nofollow or sponsored?

Nofollow vs. Check for them in your email Inbox Now. Join this super-helpful community dedicated to making money online. Newbie friendly with plenty of advanced training when you are ready Click here for free access By leaving the link 3 … 2. Why your rewardStyle affiliate links should be nofollow Mar 26, — Nofollow links tell Google to ignore that particular link, specifically when gathering info on how to rank the target site in search results.

Google made a set of rules for 16 … 6. Thanks Stephanie, and welcome. Thanks so much for visiting. I wonly worry that some affiliates do specify that the publishers shall not fiddle with the code… I still want to get paid when a link converts a customer follow or nofollow.

Thanks for your input, Ally. Also, with the disclosure and privacy pages will it matter if those pages are duplicate. There must be tons of duplicate privacy and disclosure pages out there.

The magic of html and how the google search bots work. HostGator has been rock solid for The Hobby Blogger. Getting up and running was a snap, so I'm really glad I chose them to host this blog.

The Hobby Blogger Building a blog one step at a time. NoFollow Affiliate Links? Licensed under Creative Commons. Filed Under: Making Money. Article by Bryan Kerr I love breaking down the techie side of blogging into easy-to-understand tutorials.

Comments Ben Norman says:. March 9, at am. Bryan Kerr says:. March 9, at pm. Dmitry Kirsanov says:. March 24, at pm. Ben Norman says:. Okto says:. March 13, at pm. Jason M says:. March 15, at pm. Cameron says:. October 9, at pm.

Justin Mazza says:. March 21, at pm. Sam says:. June 24, at am. Howdy Bryan, Good article. June 25, at am. Feel free to tweet Matt :. I agree that your option is a good one…and perhaps it was so many outbound links; not that it was affiliate links. I agree with Steve. I have seen penalties on sites that have just too many links on one or more pages, nothing to do with redirecting links, or Amazon. But number of links for the amount of text on the page and maybe also the size of the site.

Great info for your readers. Im actually kind of surprised they restored your ranking so quickly… thats pretty fast. Curiosity should get anyone interested to click… and if so, you hooked them with the amazon cookie.

Lucky guy I must say! I was thinking that maybe onsite duplicated content is hitting you, like somebody mentioned in comments. I started looking at my websites to check for onsite duplication, and found that all of them have it.. Andrew…there is no duplicate content. What you are seeing on these websites that check for duplication is not correct.

Google understands the structure of wordpress and does not count this as duplicate content. Ah…good point. You will simply include cloaked redirect links in your e-book. They lead back to your website which then redirects to Amazon. In case Amazon links change you can easily update redirects on your website. So the e-book never gets out of sync. It will behave like an outpost that always leads back to your website. Imagine Amazon stops selling your affiliate product.

Or later you find a better supplier. You simply update your redirect link on your website without any need to update the e-book. Updating e-book may even be impossible after it has been downloaded hundreds or thousands of times. I have a site in the electronics niche and I also recently built some big comparison tables one per brand. Each table is on a different page. Each table has about 10 products and 2 affiliate links per product, so 20 links per table.

However, this has not hurt my rankings. My site is on page 2 and has stayed there. I think the proportion of people trying to click on the image will be negligeable if you have a clear call-to-action. You must also solve the paradox of choice problem see the jam study : the more choices you have, the less likely your readers will be able to decide which knife to buy.

However, you do need a good amount of knifes since your readers will be filtering based on characteristics so you want a big enough database to make filtering worth it. Awesome tips and advice Romain! Great to hear that you are successfully using up to 20 links per table. I may reduce the size of my matrix a bit and only use one link…great advice. Very interesting.

Would love to know the directories you are submitting to OR even just why you chose them — are you sharing this somewhere? I have my VA working on a list I am developing and it seems to be working.

I like option 2 and 3 — they seem to make the most sense to me without getting radical. In option 3 for example I think the difference between 20 and 50 may be all you need to fly under the radar.

Would be easy to check. I have a review page of a product with 9 Amazon links and it ranks well. But I also have over words and several informational links too. My page has almost words of content in addition to the chart. Absolutely ridiculous and laughable! Fact: The affiliate links had nothing to do with the penalty. Proof: You made the changes and the rankings returned the same day, and Google is unlikely to have crawled and re-indexed your site after the affiliate links were removed and prior to the lifting of the penalty.

Note: This comment is based on my experience while attempting to rank a sizable number of niche sites. I beg to differ Charley. Google most certainly could have crawled my site after 9 hours.

So, 9 hours in my opinion is plenty of time. Oh and Fourth point why you might be wrong and my assumption correct, MANY others have experienced the same thing with Amazon affiliate links that I just laid out.

Many of those people have commented here. Your deductions are plausible enough to be believed but not enough to eradicate doubt. Let me point out your errors again. You are talking about new pages, not already indexed pages. However, pages on older and established websites oftentimes get crawled and reindexed every 24 hours.

It was likely no more than a Google dance. Google is unpredictable. Two different websites having the same kind of backlinks can behave differently in the search results. Those who had a similar experience as you and reached the same conclusion as you did are probably uninformed. Just giving my well-founded perspective on the matter.

These changes may be the result of legitimate modifications or rank-modifying spamming. Basically, as a response to your seo efforts, Google will randomly assign a fake rank transition rank , before letting your site deserve its true final position in SERPs, just to get you perplexed. Even positive changes you make, may have a strong negative result in SERPs because in case of an impatient spammer, this is bound to spark a reaction.

From this moment on, Google has its all eyes on your moves. Your actions during transition rank, will be the decisive element whether your site deserves the target new rank. Great to hear your site is back in business. If I were you, I would go with option four.

Not only would you receive a lot more visits from the search engines, but people will enjoy reading a review on each knife rather than be brought to an Amazon page. I run a few Amazon review sites myself. Amazon sales are great. Typically I go with 4 to 5 affiliate links per to word article. Thats way to cool! A lot of people are watching your progress! Thanks for sharing the story. Interestingly one of our niche sites also a knife review site had completely removed from Google index.

We also were making some money with the site. Google had sent a message in webmaster resource center about some issue before they removed the site from the index. It was about breaking the quality guidelines. Removed all the duplicate content 2. Added command in robot. But …….. Links from page one go to internal pages that compare brands and also pages that compare models within the same brand.

Amazon always wins out as far as sales are concerned. I had the same exact thing happen to my largest niche site which exploded to 10k uniques within 30 days of launching it. It soon got penalized and fell to about uniques a month. I stepped out of the Niche site business all together after this and started my own web marketing company.

Much much better business. Playing the Google game is not a long term strategy. I even tell clients this, and we supplement with PPC, banner ads etc. They love Amazon in fact. I run Amazon websites and have great rankings when I target low competition products.

The key is 1 affiliate link max per words. You just give them a taste of the comparison to chart and then give it all to them if they opt in. Great read, Spencer. That could give you more unique articles, which is something that Google tends to favor.

Everything being equal re. In your individual reviews, you could then use pieces of your matrix in the form of a clickable image to show were this knife or that knife falls compared to others… just a thought.

So the primary problem was all of the links on the home page itself. I believe you said there were about 50 links. The best thing I suggest is just option 2 move the matrix to a sub page on your navigation menu. Chris, great thoughts hear and thanks for discussing with me. I will add that using your EasyAzon plugin has made adding my links SO much easier. I just have to uncheck a box in the plugin and it takes effect on my entire site.

I like your advice about moving the entire matrix off the homepage…this may take care of it. Chris is totally right. Spencer — congrats on getting your rankings back, what plugin did you use to create the comparison chart. Could be any number of reasons or could just be the google dance.

Correlation does not equal causation. Your sample size is too small to make an inference that this one deference tanked your rankings. You would have to build multiple niche sites, selling the knives and try different things on each one and see what causes rises and falls in the search engine.

Then you would need to test your theory over several months before you could come to a sure conclusion. However, based on my experience with hundreds of niche sites…and the results I saw; this is a very probable cause. Any ideas are appreciated! I disagree with the individual above criticizing Spencer because most of the links Spencer was working on were to blogs and directories.

Most of the directory submissions I gather based on my experience takes weeks or months before they even post the link. So, I am not really buying the criticism and feel that it is definitely Amazon related.

I would like to echo the call for a list of directories Spencer is submitting to, if he is so inclined. I have been scouring and looking and having some trouble. Most of the ones I find cost money, require a reciprocal link or take months to review. Spencer, are you going to post your list? If not, that is cool. But, just looking for a definitive answer. With respect to the e-book, I am pretty sure embedded amazon links are a no-no there. But, I am not an expert. I mainly base this on stuff I have read regarding emails.

Amazon will not let you embed an affiliate link directly back to Amazon in an email. But you are allowed to embed a link to a page or blog post where you spotlight or feature a product that does have the affiliate link. Essentially I took the 50 or so with the highest page rank and that were free. Perhaps I will post in the future. This links will have minimal impact on rankings…these are weak links. More powerful links will come later. To make it more interactive, you can integrate a feature where users can build their own comparisons.

I am not convinced that the affiliate links were the issue. Before taking any drastic measure about your website content or format, you may want to read this thread, since there is a google update going on these days, starting from march, and many people reported their site tanking in serps just to come back a couple days later..

Of course, if you put your links back just to be sure and your site tanks again , even the doubting Thomas would be convinced… but obviously if i were you i would not risk that, especially since this is a public case study. And yes, the Google update from march 6th and 7th is well known and reported on. Too many closely-clustered affiliate links, perhaps. But most likely it was too many external links to the same domain. I am sure it would rank differently with a number of different affiliate links.

But instead of a table with line-by-line links, put a greater amount of text in between each line of links or even between each link. I would perhaps put product description text, or even just the product names. See how it works. You never know until you try — and it would be interesting to see what happens. The sad thing is that there is really no way to prove anything when it comes to SEO. With a new site like you have made, I believe it takes Google quite awhile to get through the data.

Since Google is just a software program, it takes quite a bit of time to analyze all of the data. When I make a new squidoo lens, if I check keyword rankings, it will be anywhere from top up to in google, which would indicate a penalty.

However, once I build a few links to that page, it will start ranking. When you fixate on the rankings, you might end up doing something irraitonal, like asking for all of the built links to be removed, which could potentially start another problem. I really, really doubt that there was ever a penalty because there just was not enough time for all of that to happen. Around the time when this supposedly happened, I believe is quite awhile after Googlebot first indexed the site. If you want to do an experiment, use a brand new website as a guinea pig, add affiliate links to the homepage and see if the same thing happens.

Also, I think Amazon Associates will ban your account if you are cloaking links. I think Dave over at zenduck actually had his account banned for this exact reason. I think they specifically said to not cloak your affiliate links. Also, everything I said above is based on my own personal experience and not speculation. I hope I helped, and good luck with this case study! Much love. Julian — you are entitled to your opinion, and so am I.

Google has evolved alot over the past couple of years, and the Google dance is basically non-existent. A visual inspection would turn up some content in the beginning and then this huge Affiliate link chart with some more content after. Let the users build onto your content by leaving comments for each knife and use a star voting system to determine the best knives or something like that.

Thanks for sharing this, great article. I think option 4 is a good strategy. And then inside your review page, you can put the affiliate link to the image and to a CTA button.

I think having people see what other people experience about the product you are reviewing will increase your conversion rate. Definitely option 4. Think long term on this site. Love the comparison matrix and you should keep it.

Write reviews and add the review page link to the matrix as you go. Make sure to throw in some crappy knives as well and review appropriately. I would not cloak links. Amazon has a trust factor associated with it. People will feel safe when thinking if they should click. Wow, what an input of information! I like Chris Guthries input on this.

I think that cloaking has had a bigger effect than you might think. Chris says that Google can still read it and Java based re-directs.

Matt Cutts has a video about cloaking on their site. Keeps us up to date on this Spencer, and hoping you start really tearing it up.

The best…. Make each specific knife in the matrix link to a product review page of that knife. Add one or two affiliate links from the product review page. Then you would have 50 product review pages for your site and that would add massive authority. That was option 4 from your post and I think that is the perfect answer. I hate for you to have to give up on Amazon when it was starting to work so well…. I would go with option 4 because it means more content and searches for your site.

I came across this before when I was a member over at the keyword academy. A few guys in the forums had a similar problem with a theme that showed quite a few amazon links on the homepage. Exactly the same results as you when they removed or decreased the links if I remember correctly. Thanks for mentioning that others have experienced a similar penalty with too many affiliate links.

When you first made your site public, I saw the table you created and thought that looked pretty cool. I had never seen that done in a table before, so I have replicated it. I just put my affiliate products into different categories and create a post about that category of the product. I was wondering about about creating a separate site that would not rely on ranking or content but it would be more of a catalog for my products that I could tie in with my main site somehow. I will put some products on the main site but create a big link or something to entice people to go to the catalog site, that will look similar to the main site.

Instead of a separate catalog site; why not try option 2 I mentioned in the article. That might work. With regards to the site being a public test site and repeating the process or not is of course your own decision, if it tanks permanently, at least it is early days right?

Sorry if it has been going for a while, new here! I will be adding links back, but hope to never find the threshold…sorry :. I let someone else try that! I agree with Julian above! What were you thinking of Spencer? Putting all those cloaked links on one page — especially the homepage?? I think you probably were down-ranked due to cloaking but I think it was all within the dance… especially on a new site! Again to clarify for everyone.

I was using redirects, which are not against google tos or Amazons you can do some searching if you want. Also, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of different types of penalties. A spammy backlinking penalty for example would indeed takes weeks to recover from.

But a small penalty due to too many affiliate links? Obviously not very long. My opinion — there are differing degrees of penalties with Panda and Penguin being bigger and harder to recover from. Smaller penalties are easy to recover from with a simple tweak. Only Google knows for sure…so we are all doing our best to make a judgement call.

I felt like my call was pretty well supported. I guess it is purely due to the fact that it makes things look a little un-natural. I noticed your rankings were gone during that period and then saw them come bounce back again yesterday. Good news on recovering. I have a current niche site, about 6 months old, that ranks and earns extremely well which uses 2 adsense units and 4 amazon links per page, 3 of the links are images and the other is a css button.

The Amazon links are not cloaked, they are just plain affiliate links and have not affected rankings at all. So if you, or anyone else here, ever needs some sort of numbers in regards to avoiding penalties due to Amazon links, the above numbers to work fine.

I have Amazon niche sites in France. For example, the HTML code for your link should look like this:. Amend the code by pasting in the correct attribute after your affiliate link, but before the closing bracket, like this:. Once the HTML code is amended you can update your site and the changes will be reflected immediately.

If your links are behind banner displays, log into your affiliate account and download new banners. There are plenty of different plugins available to make the task easier for you. Some of these include:.