Hiding Affiliate Links
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Hello,
Currently I'm developing a website that will contain a lot of affiliate links (5000). This is because I'm going to compare the prices of a lot of products. The visitor can go to all websites (my advertisers) that sell these products via affiliate links.
My question is how to hide these affiliate links. I've read lots of solutions, like:
- cloaking,
- rel=nofollow,
- using JavaScript,
- 301 redirects.
I would like to know what the best solution is to deal with these affiliate links for SEO.
Regards,
Martijn
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What EGOL said and what Sebes said combined. If you want to run your affiliate links through an internal 302 redirect first (so that you can better track click activity) then that is a pretty well established process. You'd want to nofollow those links, of course.
But cloaking? Nope. Don't even think about it.
I recently had an issue where the developers put up a global header nav that used javascript. The JS was in a folder called /js/, which was blocked in the robots.txt file. Within an hour the site was penalized. google still showed the global header nav in their preview so I know they rendered the JS. My guess is after rendering they said, hey wait - the page Chrome/Browser rendered for our preview doesn't look like the page our standard Googlebot sees. They must be cloaking.
Keep it simple and don't try to fool people who are a lot smarter than you. That's what I've learned over the years.
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Google is pretty good at discovering affiliate links (esp. to the well known networks). But to be sure use rel=nofollow.
Be aware that google is able to render pages with javascript and thus able to see the links and I would never dare to cloak anything
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Hide them in thick content.
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