Do affiliate banners hurt SEO?

by Mattk
7 replies
  • SEO
  • |
If you have a couple affiliate banners on your wordpress blog, will it hurt your ability to rank highly in google? Does it matter if they are in your sidebar or on your posts?

I know you can no follow a text link, but how about a banner?
#affiliate #banners #hurt #seo
  • Profile picture of the author michael_nguyen
    Originally Posted by Mattk View Post

    If you have a couple affiliate banners on your wordpress blog, will it hurt your ability to rank highly in google? Does it matter if they are in your sidebar or on your posts?

    I know you can no follow a text link, but how about a banner?
    Not really, if anything it can help your SEO. When you create your banner, change the ALT tags to whatever keyword your after.
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    • Profile picture of the author Josh-A
      There should not be any problem. If you aer adding a link to the banner
      then make sure you have added the tag rel="nofollow".
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  • Profile picture of the author jasonmorgan
    well, when it comes to something like this, just think... 'is it hurting porn and viagra guy' ?

    Those sites have plenty of banner ads and affiliate links, rank very well and bring in hundreds of thousands of surfers a day, so they can't be all that bad.

    Also, considering you can find site in these niches with fairly high page rank, google isn't penalizing them for using these ad methods. Also kinda tosses out the window the idea of porn and gambling being bad neighborhoods that are going to hurt your rankings.

    you can nofollow an image link the same way you nofollow a text link, rel=nofollow
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    I'm all about that bass.

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  • Profile picture of the author Mattk
    Thanks Jason, good point about the porn. I don't know where but I thought I heard that Google doesn't like affiliate banners and links. Must be something I made up in my head to make this all more complicated than it is.
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    • Profile picture of the author sbp8610
      Originally Posted by Mattk View Post

      Thanks Jason, good point about the porn. I don't know where but I thought I heard that Google doesn't like affiliate banners and links. Must be something I made up in my head to make this all more complicated than it is.
      A lot of people (including myself) tend to make SEO too complicated. I once read somewhere that it's best to just pretend like Google doesn't even exist. Just spend time creating unique content and backlinking that content, and be sure to do your proper keyword optimization of course. Do this without worrying about Google and you should rank very well.
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  • Profile picture of the author chini
    Just use tracking202, and do a redirect. Hows google going to know its a affialite link
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  • Profile picture of the author jimbo999
    Jason, you can no follow a banner just like a text link. I always no follow. If you don't you are boosting the rank of the affiliate page which could theoretically take conversions away from you.
    @Chini - Google still knows the end result because they follow redirects.
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