Do clickbank links lower your Google/search engine rank?

[rif]

Are clickbank or affiliate links recognized by search engines? Do they subsequently lower your rank because of this?


I was curious if this were true as I've seen it online. I've seen one my sites drop in rank recently after adding a clickbank link to the site. Could be a coincidence, but maybe not. Looking forward to your input.

[Steven Heron]

There's no definite answer, sorry to say. There's too many coincidences to know anything in SEO outside of controlled studies.

There is a possibility that an affiliate link will decrease your rankings if your site substantially lacks unique content, there are plenty examples of this. However, there are sites like about.com which have plenty of affiliate links who's pages rank extremely well. It's really hard to pinpoint the cause and effect. It could be site Trust, it could be anything... who really knows.

You could of course make up your own speculation and sell an ebook about it.

[aisloy15]

I like your discussion.Thank you very much.

[rahulr]

Having a lot of affiliate out going links to commercial and ecommerce websites (Like amazon) would hurt your rankings.That's why ezine articles no longer allow affiliate links in your articles.

[seolearner09]

Your affiliate links can be hidden with the 'nofollow' tag.

However, I think as long as you have *useful* or informative content on your site and lots of it, then it probably does not matter if you have aff links or not.

One website here in the UK has 'tens of thousands' of aff links everywhere on its pages (huge site). However, it also has a boatload of useful content. It ranks number one for many keywords.

[HCLee]

I agree. There is no harm in putting affiliate links as long as you have good content and they serve a good purpose.If you are not comfortable with too many affiliank links on you page, you can nofollow them without worry from Google.

[camm]

I have heard different theories about this and have never gotten a straight answer. You can always hide your affiliate links in a redirect and then it will not look like an affiliate link. I always use the following redirect method and make it a no follow link as well.

- Create a folder (ie go, order, product name, etc)
- Use the following redirect and save it as index.php inside that same folder.
- Upload that folder to your hosting account

<?php
header( 'Location: http://youraffiliatelink.com' ) ;
?>

Your link will now look like yourdomain.com/go or whatever you named the folder

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by rahulr

Having a lot of affiliate out going links to commercial and ecommerce websites (Like amazon) would hurt your rankings.That's why ezine articles no longer allow affiliate links in your articles.

Yes. That makes sense. Amazon is now pairing with blogspot to put associates
ads on them. So watch your blogspot ranking dive. Google did this on purpose.
They need to weed out some blogs. Cull the herd. So tricking people into
putting amazon ads was a terrific back door approach. Clever google.

Paul

[bigleaf]

Originally Posted by rif

Are clickbank or affiliate links recognized by search engines? Do they subsequently lower your rank because of this?

In my experience they definitely help. I just created a new product in ClickBank, Relaxing Meditation, at RelaxingMeditation.org. I was following a plan from a workshop of local IM pros in my area. The idea was NOT to use SEO, but to use affiliates to get traffic and sales.

I bombed out on the affiliates/traffic idea - just couldn't get any interest going from potential affiliates I contacted.

Anyway, I worked on some other projects for a couple of weeks, then decided to try SEO on the site. Before I did any work on that, I checked the results position for the keyword 'relaxing meditation' to get a baseline.

I was totally surprised to find the site at #12 for that keyword. At that time, the SEO on the site was terrible. It had very low density for the main keyword and very poor use of SEO techniques on images, links, etc.

The only thing going for the site was the domain name (exact match with keyword) and the incoming links from ClickBank affiliates who publish the entire CB database on their web sites.

Since then, I have done the on-site SEO right and seen it move up to #7 in the results. I intend to build a link wheel to move it up even higher so I can capture more traffic.

*** Oops - I missed the point that you were talking about outgoing links. My whole post is about incoming links. I have heard other people swear that incoming links from CB are worthless. Can't prove that by me.

[timpears]

If you are worried about it, then use a PHP redirect such as 'camm' suggests. But use a robots.txt file to block the spiders from spidering your folder with the redirects in in it. I can't give you the exact details on how to do it, as I forget right now. But it is easy to find it by doing a search of If you are worried about it, then use a PHP redirect such as 'camm' suggests. But use a robots.txt file to block the spiders from spidering your folder with the redirects in it. I can't give you the exact details on how to do it, as I forget right now. But it is easy to find it by doing a search of Google.

[searchnology]

Using "nofollow" tags will NOT hide your links...it just doesn't allow the links to pass Pagerank, but they are index just as well....Where does this stuff come from!!

Originally Posted by seolearner09

Your affiliate links can be hidden with the 'nofollow' tag.

However, I think as long as you have *useful* or informative content on your site and lots of it, then it probably does not matter if you have aff links or not.

One website here in the UK has 'tens of thousands' of aff links everywhere on its pages (huge site). However, it also has a boatload of useful content. It ranks number one for many keywords.