Search Engines Hate Affiliate Sites

Is this true?

[mmmwowmmm]

I've heard people say that they were penalized or even banned by search engines for having affiliate links on their sites. I plan to add affiliate links to my site, and this worries me. Anybody have any information on this, I would GREATLY appreciate a heads up - Thanks!

[zivkovicp]

not true.

[mmmwowmmm]

Ok, I like your answer answer - but how did you arrive at that conclusion? By having lots of affiliate links on your site and still doing well in the search engines (on your keywords)?

I've been looking for answers the last few days, and I keep finding conflicting evidence...

At this point it looks like I'll go ahead and put up the links, but I'm just trying to get a more thorough understanding of the issue, because it does seem to be an "issue" with a lot of folks.

[SeanW]

I think it's the difference between causation and correlation.

Affiliate links may correlate to poor rankings, but they are not the cause.

The goal of the SEs is to provide relevent content to users. Sites that are generated by scrapers, or otherwise provide less value than authoritative sites are viewed by the SEs as less desirable than the authoritative sites. Chances are scraper sites are there to generate AM revenue, and therefore will have more affiliate links.

So, it probably wasn't the affiliate links that caused the problem, it was other things on the page designed to attract viewers to the links.

Sean

[buckworks]

Google and MSN do not seem to object to affiliate links as long as they like the site for other reasons. Yahoo will rank an affiliate site normally as long as it doesn't come to the attention of a human editor. Yahoo will sometimes ban sites completely for having too many affiliate links. No amount of original content can defend you if a Yahoo editor decides your site has too many affiliate links.

[TrustNo1]

"I've been looking for answers the last few days, and I keep finding conflicting evidence... "

The best evidence is going right to the source. Go to google.com, msn.com, yahoo.com, type stuff in, affiliate sites everywhere. You'll see affiliates post this type of nonsense if their site takes a hit, forgetting that non-affiliate sites take hits too. Just people posting their fear.

[mmmwowmmm]

ok, that really helps. That brings up another question, then - as far as a human editor at Yahoo is concerned, do you think it helps that the aff links from my site are also TO my site? Meaning that they go from mysite.com to affiliatetrackingservice.com and back to mysite.com (it's set up that way to give commissions to the people who write articles for my website, those are my affiliates) It's not like I have a bunch of aff links that go to other websites.

[hunderdown]

I think if you have good original content, a few affiliate links on a page don't matter. But I do have some anecdotal evidence that LOTS of affiliate links on a page can be a minus, at least on Google. I have one page on my site that lists a lot of books, each linked to Amazon. I had plans to reorganize it, solicit relevant links to it, and get it to move up in Google. At the time, it was showing up on the 4th or 5th page on what I thought were the relevant searches. Then after an update it just dropped out altogether. Not sure what I am going to do with it now. I suppose it could have been some other factor, but no other page on my site was affected in this way.

At worst, you need to avoid overloading your site with affiliate links. Use them sparingly, have original content, reviews that will sell the product, and you will prosper (provided there aren't dozens of sites in the same area, that is).

[mmmwowmmm]

The way I originally had it planned was that each nav buttons leading out of each "article page" to the other parts of my site (home/faq/about us/store/etc) would be an affilaite link, that's 7 links in all... now I'm thinking I should just put one link out from the article page, maybe to the store. The articles provide plenty of original content.

[hunderdown]

nav buttons that actually take you to the merchant instead of the other parts of your site, as people would expect? I don't follow you. I don't think you'll get a good conversion rate if you do that....

A link IN the article to a product or store section directly related to the subject of the article will convert best.

[edited by: hunderdown at 6:04 pm (utc) on May 17, 2005]

[TrustNo1]

"But I do have some anecdotal evidence that LOTS of affiliate links on a page can be a minus, at least on Google."

Just not true. My site is a straight up affiliate site, no hiding it. Lots of pages with lots of affiliate links and those pages do fine. There are lots of reasons why pages drop. Like I said earlier there are sites out there with 0 affiliates links that drop. Pages dropping just part of the SE roller coaster and affiliates just assume it's because of the affiliate links because it's an affiliate site that dropped.

[hunderdown]

Trust, you have an homogenous site, so you wouldn't see any differences from one page to another.

I wasn't talking about an entire SITE. I was talking about a PAGE, a page that is different from the other pages on my site, in one important way.

Different sites, different experiences.

In any case, we agree on the big issue: affiliate links aren't a problem. I just think that a page loaded down with tons of affiliate links, might, compared to other pages that have only a few such links, perform relatively poorly in search engines.

[mmmwowmmm]

"nav buttons that actually take you to the merchant instead of the other parts of your site, as people would expect?"

Yes, it's an unusual set-up. I have a store that sells my own items, and I also have funny articles. The articles are written by my affiliates, who get a commission for customers they draw to the website. I use the affiliate links (on each nav link out of each article page)to track when they have brought someone to the site. So it's not like other aff programs, I'm paying them for drawing customers, not sending them to my site.

[hunderdown]

Oh. Then I think the discussion we've had doesn't even begin to apply....

[mmmwowmmm]

"Oh. Then I think the discussion we've had doesn't even begin to apply.... "

Why not? I just assumed that, to a spider, an Aff link is an Aff link - It's not like they realize what I'm up to, or why I put the links there. Do you think having an affiliate link from my own site to my own site could create a problem?

[hunderdown]

Doesn't apply because IF the SEs penalize aff. links, they probably only penalize the ones that are spread all over the web--Amazon, Ebay, CJ, etc. I'm guessing that they wouldn't categorize your links in the same way.

[mmmwowmmm]

Thanks - I see what you're saying. I'm using clixgalore to do the tracking, so the aff links go to clixgalore and then back to my site. I assumed the spiders would recognize clixgalore as a wide-spread affiliate service...

[hunderdown]

Oh, I thought you had your own set-up. Hmm. Make sure you have your own internal links, too.

[mmmwowmmm]

I really appreciate the help, and I don't mean to bug you all to death about this, but here's another thought: Is there a way to diguise the aff links with js or something? Or is that just asking for trouble? I also kind of worry that having aff links FROM my site TO my site may be seen as some kind of trick, and get penalized for that. Has anyone heard of an aff system used like this before? It seemed like a good way to get people to write content for my site. I'm almost to the point of not being that worried about it, I just don't want my site to get banned.

[Reid]

You should take a look at some .php or .cgi scripts. They are not hard to set up, they're free and you don't have to go offsite to track your affiliates, you could be onto something here.