How to best add affiliate links in a way that minimizes panda risk?
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We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search.
We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors.
Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?
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Hi Britney, my plan would be to put at the end of the page about 5 small unobstrusive links to 5 different relevant affiliate sites.
Thanks for pointing to the case study, which was very interesting and gives hope that if we would suffer penalization by google we could recover fast by just removing the links. -
Hey lcourse,
Definitely don't send users through an intermediate URL, that will get you penalized.
How many affiliate links are you looking to add? If it's just a few you should be fine.
Don't try to hide anything from G or go overboard on affiliate links. Here's a great affiliate link penalty case study to better understand the limitations of affiliate marketing.
Hope that helps,
B
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