Is Google penalizing sites with affiliate links?

4 replies
A lot has been said about google penalizing sites that contain too many affiliate links. How do you guys get around this issue?

I am in the process of setting up a new wordpress blog, which will contain a detailed products and services section. A number of these links will be affiliate links and I dont want my blog to be penalized by google for having this section.

Should I ensure that the products and services page contains the robots.txt file to prevent google from crawling it-does this work? Also would you make sure that all of the affiliate links have the no follow tag.

One option I thought might work is to have a seperate website with all of my products and services on. I could then link to this website from my wordpress blog. In theory my main blog would not be penalised as it does not contain the affiliate links.

The products and services website could still incorporate the robots.txt file and no follow tag for all the links. What do you reckon to this method?

Any help, advice or suggestions on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
#affiliate #google #links #penalizing #sites
  • Profile picture of the author jcruz
    Your overdoing it, you answered your own question. Google penalizes sites that have too many affiliate links. As long as you don't put two many your fine. I would stick to one and two and work on your conversions than go from there.
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    • Profile picture of the author GMD
      Banned
      As far as I know, Google is NOT penalizing for affiliate links. They ARE penalizing for affiliate links if the ad-to-content ratio is totally out of whack!

      They will also penalize for duplicate content, copy and pasted content, scraped content, low quality garbage, etc.

      And unless I'm not understanding your point, why in the world would you NOT want Google to crawl it? How is anybody going to find your page in the SERPS? ...unless they've got a direct link to it.
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    • Profile picture of the author mickdhill
      Appreciate what your saying, but a detailed products and services section would contain more than one or two links, so I need a solution to get around this problem.
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      • Profile picture of the author GMD
        Banned
        Understood.

        Your whole situation would work out as long as you've got quality, original content there along with your links.

        Some people have two or three sentences of text and then have like 10 ads up on the same page -- this is what Google's going after.

        The correct ratio should be:

        content - link
        content - link
        content - link

        Obviously that's being super conservative; you could easily get away with a 1:2 ratio here.
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