Adding Affiliate Links To An Established Site - plans and questions

[burcot]

I have got a site, in fact - it's my absolute favorite site.

It has lots of informational pages written by major players in it's nich. The pages rank with site links for umpteen key word/phrases.

I want to add a folder with reviews and information about products. Each page will be hand written (no feeds)
and images will often be hand shot, so - no duplicated content. The pages will often include video and also link to instructional articles.

I want to add one affiliate link per review page. There will be no other affiliate links outside of this folder.
Some of the merchants in this niche have over 10,000 products, so you can see where i'm going with this.

Anyhow after reading negative posts about aff links and Google (thanks tedster):) I have 3 questions

1: In your valued opinions does my site sound as though it could support potentially thousands of affiliate links?

2: Would the rest of the site be filtered/penalised if the links are frowned upon

3: Assuming it did trip a filter - would it be lifted if i removed the links

Thanks

[bwnbwn]

burcot there are many many sites that have affilate links doing just fine. I would suspect the vast majority of the ones that took a hit were on the thin side and probably relied more on links they generated/purchased then the more natural way of people linking to good content.

If your site is what you say it is there is nothing wrong with your approach and IMO you will do just fine. I wouldn't even worry about a filter and just work your site to make you some money, keep up the hard work and you will be just dandy.

[burcot]

bwnbwn
Thank you for your reassuring words. This site is the only one that I haven't built links for. So spammy inbounds will definitely not play a part

[mhansen]

I am just going to drop my opinion in also... I would trickle the affiliate links in VERY SLOWLY, and monitor changes on your site very thoroughly.

These latest October updates are very odd...

- I have a +2 year old "stupid-thin" 1-hop affiliate site that now ranks #1-4 (That's 1st through 4th) for the money phrase with almost no backlink building that is generating several thousands of daily pageviews. (One of those sites you build to test something and walk away from...oops)

- I also have a very content rich site that was completely duped on Oct 29th and stopped getting ANY traffic from google. (Not dropped from the index, but literally ZERO Google referrals since 10/29)

I would just take great care with affiliate links right now, they seem to have a bullseye on them!

[burcot]

mhansen
Thanks for joining in. I assume your content rich site has affiliate links - right?
If so, what makes you think this is causing the sudden traffic loss

[mhansen]

Thanks for joining in. I assume your content rich site has affiliate links - right?

It does... but very few. The site is a well written and researched buying guide and promotes just 2 separate affiliate offers and those are with banners.

By content rich, I mean thousands of well written words per page, not written for search or landing purposes, but to actually help people make buying choices based on several years of experience in the trade.

I have not done any testing on the site thats been effected, and I may not test at all. Build more content, attract more backlinks.. take what I get and move on.

[indyank]

interestingly you say that your thin 1-hop affiliate site is performing well while a few affiliate links in content rich sites are frowned upon by google (since october). Do you nofollow those affiliate links?

[mhansen]

Do you nofollow those affiliate links?

Yes. I also have them after a /out/ directory as well, which is disallowed in the robots.txt

- rel=nofollow (Since it could be considered paid)
- domain.tld/out/link (to try and keep out of search index)
- 307 sent to header

Like I mentioned, "I quit" when it comes to trying to satisfy Google. They can no-follow me right over to Bing, where I also encourage everyone I know to switch to.

[indyank]

mhansen, i do understand your frustration. The recent changes in google are absolute nonsense to say the least.But Bing never gave me the confidence and will never in future. Google is killing themselves by following what Bing is implementing.Eric Schmidt feared Bing, despite google was the king, and seemed to have no confidence in what they (google) were doing.Rather, he thinks that they had to do one better than whatever microsoft does to bing, and these are the results.

But they are still satisfying the big corporates and brands and that is what they care about the most and not the lesser mortals.

[edited by: indyank at 4:11 pm (utc) on Nov 5, 2010]

[mhansen]

Bing never gave me the confidence and will never in future

I hear ya... I never really cared for MSN or Yahoo to be honest, and used Google for everything when it came to search, but decided to give Bing a chance in August and really haven't looked back.

From a webmaster perspective, I find the bing traffic just as, if not more rewarding, IMHO.

The tide will eventually change against Google... then against their replacement... then against whoever replaces them... etc etc.

Who knows... Maybe it will be Blekko that changes the way we find things on the web. At least they are a bit more open about rankings, algo, etc!

Like I say...I quit trying to please G, and will just accept what they do or don't give, and move on to pleasing someone else.

[Yellow_Sun]

burcot,

I agree with bwnbwn. You will be fine adding affiliate links. For some odd reason you think you got penalized for adding out-bound affiliate links, which would really surprise me, you can always take off the links and send in a re-inclusion request to get things back to normal. But, I don't see that happening and just make sure you don't do anything stupid with getting in-links.

Good luck!