Since affiliate marketing is so common on many websites and Google keeps changing their standards for how they rate websites, many are left wondering if their affiliate advertisements will have a negative impact on their ranking. Getting blacklisted from Google may seem like a scary thing, especially when you website depends on SEO as its main source of traffic. For the most part, it will not affect your Google ranking but there are some things you should watch out for.
Avoid Using Do-Follow Links For Affiliates
Google will follow the Do-Follow links on your blog and will then tie it in with the rest of the content of your blog. This may not seem like such a bad thing, but it could potentially send some red flags if your affiliate link seems like Spam in comparison to the rest of your content. At the same time, avoid disabling non-follow links, in general, is that can also impact your site's rating.
Don't Stuff Too Much
It is understandable that your blog needs compensation through affiliate links, especially since Adsense is not paying so well these days. On the other hand, if Google detects that you are stuffing several affiliate links within your content, that might set off some alarms that your website contains spam. It is best to keep affiliate advertisements relevant to your content and just use a few links that are stuffed naturally within your content. An exception to this would be a long list of product reviews, in which a long list of affiliate links would fit in naturally.
Affiliate Plugins For Wordpress Sites
Naturally, you will probably want some sort of tool to handle affiliate codes to avoid and link violations with Google.
Go Codes or
Thirsty Affiliates is an example of a powerful affiliate link manager that can help with masking or disable do-follow links when necessary. Using link masking plugins may also prove to be useful when you need to redirect links instead of directly linking within your content.
