Affiliate and Earning Disclosure help please
-
Hello Moz Friends,
I wanted to ask about affiliate terms pages.
I'm assuming that if I have an affiliate banner where someone clicks on it, and I get a penny, that I need to have an affiliate disclosure or some sort of link saying that I make money.
I'm know is some legal ground here, but just curious if this is how the concept works?
Thank you so much!
-
Super affiliate here. While Everett and Thomas are right to point you in the direction of the FTC texts, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines are just that: guidelines. They're not law, not widely enforced, and Google largely ignores affiliate links so long as they're nofollowed. They don't seem to be quite up to the level of the sponsored links and content that bloggers must disclose to avoid a Google penalty (but again, that's Google's enforcement of their own guidelines, not law.)
Some merchants with affiliate programs will insist on clear and conspicuous disclosure if you want to remain in their program, but really their panic over the guidelines died down pretty fast after they were released in 2012. The one major exception that comes to mind are credit cards providers, which are exceptionally picky about compliance on this issue since they're subject to tighter regulation on the banking side of things.
All that is not to say that disclosure isn't the right thing to do - only that it's not likely to land you in hot water with anyone anytime soon.
-
Just spent a few minutes, stumbled across this page too, not sure if this is related to affiliate or not, found via here: http://dannybrown.me/2015/04/01/sorry-affiliate-bloggers-but-your-about-page-disclosure-doesnt-cut-it/
The key part I can see is this
"In addition, it is important for advertisers to draw attention to the disclosure. Consumers may not be looking for — or expecting to find — disclosures. Advertisers are responsible for ensuring that their messages are truthful and not deceptive. Accordingly, disclosures must be communicated effectively so that consumers are likely to notice and understand them in connection with the representations that the disclosures modify. Simply making the disclosure available somewhere in the ad, where some consumers might find it, does not meet the clear and conspicuous standard."
-
Hello Chris,
You pretty much hit the nail on the head, except that the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) in the United States says it's not enough to just make the disclosure on a single page. It also needs to appear on the blog / article itself. I've included some links below that you may want to check out.
http://diannej.com/2012/new-ftc-rules-on-writing-reviews-affiliations-and-sponsored-posts/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Tips for Affiliate Website
Hi all , I would just like to have an expert Opinion on SEO for Affiliate Website . Basically if I list all Third party products (Amazon/Affilate Window etc ) on my website and then the customer will be redirected to the Affiliates website to make a Purchase will there be an issue with SEO (Lots of Outgoing Url's) and Will the website not rank for Important keywords or will it be hit by any penalty ? I heard it's not good for SEO , any work around this ? If this is case How come cashback Sites rank well with no issues , although the concept is basically the same ? Any Tips or Advice appreciated as how to get this done safe . My Preferred Option would be with Magento Shopping Cart or second option would be with Wordpress Cart only in case this provides some SEO benefits over Magento by some plugins .
Web Design | | Aus0070 -
URL Help
Will the following urls will be considered as two different urls? 1. www.example.com/key=value1& key2=value2 2. www.example.com/key2=value2 & key=value1
Web Design | | prsntsnh0 -
Help with redirects
Our travel company used to maintain a set of country destination guides on our site, under the www.oursite.com/destinations/country folder path. Because we offer tours all over the world, we used these pages as high-level guides to each country so a prospect could get a sense of the highlights of those destinations. These pages operated as landing pages too. Unfortunately the pages became stale and unfocused, and we decommissioned them. In order to bring them down, we put a 301 redirect on these URLs, pointing them to a faceted-search page that showed all of our tours to that country, with URLs: www.oursite.com/trips/country. These faceted-search pages were pulling double duty as both search pages and landing pages, which isn't ideal (from a users perspective). We are now in the process of redoing our search function and we'll need to move the search URLs off /trips/ and onto /search/. Within this transition, we are going to re-launch destination guides, and I think the best place for them will be back on the old /destinations/ subfolder. So, a few moving parts here. My question: Do you see problems with reversing the redirect path completely? Ie. where we currently redirect /destinations/country to /trips/country, we are now proposing to redirect /trips/country to /destinations/country. Our concern in this equation is that, over the last few years, we've built up significant link volumes and equity to the /trips/ pages, and we don't want to lose that.
Web Design | | Adventures0 -
I need help with international SEO for two sites?
I'll try to keep this clear... I am working with an company based in Germany, they own company.com/de and company.com/en, and that's how they are currently structuring their domains. They also own companyusa.com that they really want to show up in USA only. They want to keep company.com/en for England/english speaking Europe and company.com/de for their German audience in Germany. They are wanting us to optimize/SEO for companyusa.com, and they want that URL to show up as the top google search in the USA for their "company" keyword. What is showing up now is www.company.com/en 1st in Google because it's been around longer and it has more domain authority. What is the best practice for us optimize companyusa.com so that it is the top dog in the USA while not messing up the other domains? Should we merge? Subfolders all around? Thanks for all the input.
Web Design | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Need help to implement microdata/microformat for ecommerce site
**Can somebody please help me to implement microdata/microformats codes for our ecommerce product pages? **
Web Design | | EastEssence22
Please guide me if you have some CSS example for the same. Thanks.0 -
Need help setting up google analytics goals / tracking
I don't use Google analytics to see much more than how many visits I'm getting and what sort of keywords people are using to find our site. I'd like to step up my GA skills a bit. I'm wondring if you guys could give me some advice. I've never really set up any GA goals, or used it to track specific things, but I'd like to. Here are a few things off the top of my head that I would like to track. I'm wondring if these are posable in GA, and if someone could give me some feedback on how to track it / set up goals. Thanks.1 1. I'd like to know how many people click play on a video when they are on a page that has a video. 2. I'd like to know how many people are clicking "like" " google plus, etc.) 3. I'd like to know the path people are taking on our site. For instance, if they click a link from Facebook, and go to a landing page, what page are they visiting next..... 4. How long people are staying on the page I would really like to break this down further by people that visit a link I posted on Facebook, or twitter, or from the link on my twitter profile page, etc... Also if there are any other valuable goals / reports that would be useful for a blogger to track I'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks.
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help
Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef
Web Design | | stefanok0 -
Google News we were dropped and need help finding ot why
Hi i have a site called in2town lifestyle magazine http://www.in2town.co.uk/ and up until two months ago we were with google news and for a long time. But then all of a sudden we were dropped which left us with no confidence about our site and led us to make changes to the site, some good and some bad to try and find out what was wrong with our site and why we were dropped. We have now been concentrating on sorting the site out which has led in a drop in traffic due to not updating it as we should because we are more concerned in trying to make it a quality lifestyle magazine and get back in google as well as making it a good experience for our readers.. I would like your help and finding out what you feel is wrong with our site so we can then work on it and change it and try and find out what went wrong with google news. we have spent years on the site but now we have gone in the wrong direction because we were more worried about google news. If you can advise us on how we should change the site and sort the site out and make it into the professional site it was once more then that would be great.
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860