What is the best way to create affiliation links?

[serenoo]

If I remember well I read in this forum that Google does not like a lot affiliation websites or websites that contains a lot of affiliation links.

What is the best way to create these links without google knows about them? I know javascript could be ok, but some user could disable it.

If I write <a href="...." rel="nofollow"> do you think it will be invisible to google?

I saw someone with redirects of this kind...

<a href="www.example.com/external-links/affiliation-link.php"> where affiliation-link.php redirects to the main website.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:44 pm (utc) on Mar 8, 2010]
[edit reason] changed to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

Well, to have this discussion we need to get pat a few bits of misunderstanding that circulate in the SEO community. Google does not automatically give some kind of black mark just because a site has affiliate links. What they don't like is an affiliate link on a site that doesn't offer any value of its own.

Google's John Mueller said it well last year - something like this: if you build a great site and then add links for related affiliate sales, that is no problem. What is a problem is building a site filled with little but affiliate links and then trying to fluff it up with a bunch of text that is low value. There's no doubt in my mind that good sites with affiliate links can rank well on Google.

So I don't think trying to make the affiliate relationship invisible to Google is a very good objective. You won't be able to do it any way - certainly not with a rel="nofollow" attribute, and not even with JavaScript links.

The best approach is to create a cracking good website and market it well. Then it doesn't matter what domain finally closes the product sale.

[indyank]

Isn't Google ad manager good to create google redirected affiliate links?

[FranticFish]

Juts my opinion, but I personally would not leave spiderable affiliate links on a site, nor would I advertise them with nofollow either. I'd use Javascript and make them completely invisible to the bot. That way you don't have to worry about whether some algorithm will or won't 'approve'. If you ever get a hand review then as Ted said, so long as the site offers value then there should be no need to worry.

[Simsi]

The method I use is to have a PHP redirect script which reads links from a text file database. I pass in a code for a link, the script reads the file and sends the user to relevant place. This has several advantages:

1) You can "noindex,nofollow" the target script with a META tag
2) All your affiliate links are in one file making them easier to maintain and update
3) You dont leak juice
4) You can use the redirect page to provide a message to your users if necessary
5) You can easily geo-target the user to specific landing pages if necessary
6) You can manage multiple sites through one redirect script (not something I do but is easy)

I'd add one comment re. FranticFish's javascript method: Google can read JS links so I would assume the way in which you do it in JS would have to be a little more than just a location.href redirect.

[FranticFish]

Yes, I wasn't clear - I meant that the url is not part of the code file and is in a separate file in a folder that Google is not allowed into.

location.href or window.open (with either an absolute or relative path) - Google crawls both and sends PR and anchor text through them.

[suggy]

Just following on from what Simsi said, the only trouble with this method is maintenance. You have to keep editing that pesky file.

What I did is wrote two scripts, one the turns any link into a encrypted one (muddled so google can't recognise domain, etc) and another script that reverses this process and redirects when someone clicks the link.

I have a orphaned web form that I can copy and paste any links I want transformed into. Much faster!