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Google bots and affiliate links

by rhythmofthecosmos
6 replies
Hi,

I have started a new project since taking on a huge industry and it has been awhile since i've had this problem and can't remember how to fix it.

I have built a new site and added affiliate links etc, I have added a 301 re-direct to the affiliate links and also disallowed them in my robots.txt but I checked my affiliate account this morning and noticed that I had a huge number of clicks for those links.

I know it wasn't a real person since my site is only just being indexed. So logical breakdown means it was Google. Anyway, I need to stop this as it's messing up my conversion stats for my affiliate programs.

Any advice?
#affiliate #bots #google #links
  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    you can put an extra meta tag on those pages:

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
    Signature
    Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
    Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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  • Profile picture of the author rhythmofthecosmos
    that would affect links I want Google to follow on the same page though, right?
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    Use "noindex, nofollow" on affiliate pages that link to other affiliate pages.

    Use the "noindex, follow" on affiliate pages that link to company pages.

    Use "index, follow" on all non-affiliate pages.


    These are most often used with the rel tag in a link, i.e. rel="nofollow", but in the meta tags, it applies to all links on the page.

    Index is just that, indexing the current page. The Follow command refers to what to do on links.
    Signature
    Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
    Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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  • Profile picture of the author rhythmofthecosmos
    Yeah that's the problem, I don't have single aff pages they are mixed with the content with links I want Google to follow and I don't really want to add rel="nofollow" after each link it would take too much time.

    Hmm
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    You don't have to put it on all links.

    In your case, you want the affiliate page to have the "noindex, follow" in the meta tag for that page.

    You only need to stop Google from indexing the affiliate pages.
    Signature
    Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
    Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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    • Profile picture of the author rhythmofthecosmos
      Figured it out. Not all the restricted links have been discovered on my robots.txt yet. Only a few have been picked up by google hence why they are following the remaining links. I'll just have to wait
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