Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?

[AWCthreads]

Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links?

If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow?

Thanks.

[overalia]

What if the affiliate links are follow but they go to an specific subdomain which disallows robots via robots.txt.

Can those kind of links hurt the main domain?

Thanks in advanced.

Jabi

[AWCthreads]

Interesting. I didn't know anything about this - affecting the sender and receiver. I'll do some more digging. Thanks for shedding light on this for me.

[Dr-Pete]

It depends on how the affiliate links are set up. Let's say your affilaites using a tracking parameter (like "affiliate="). Now, you link them to a product page, such as:

www.example.com/product1.php

You could end up with a bunch of indexed pages...

www.example.com/product1.php

www.example.com/product1.php?affiliate=1

www.example.com/product1.php?affiliate=2

...etc. Those would all be seen as duplicates. Again, I'm only speaking in generalities. I don't know how your links are currently set up.

[AWCthreads]

Hi Dr. Meyers. Thanks for the note and the link. I understand the first part of your response. However, I don't fully undertand the second part. How will an incoming affiliate link create duplicate content for me (the recipient of the link)?

[Dr-Pete]

It's less common than when you're using obvious paid links, but there is some amount of risk. It really depends on how strong and diverse your link profile is. If you're talking a relatively small percentage, it's probably ok. If the majority of your links are affiliate links, it could look shady to Google. It depends on the nature of the links, the industry, etc. too.

The other issue is that affiliate links can often create duplicate content issues, so it can make sense to consolidate them (usually, with canonical tags or 301-redirects). That's a separate issue, though.

You might find this post from Joost de Valk interesting:

http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/

Edit: A couple more posts - it's a complex topic:

http://www.darrinward.com/blog/seo/google-penalty-nofollow-affiliate-links

http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/

[SlavaRybalka]

I have never heard of anything bad connected with affiliate links.

I have seen at least 2 websites that use affiliate marketing and they are doing good.

1. <cite>www.undergroundtraininglab.com/</cite>
2. <cite>www.ultimatewowguide.com/</cite>

Both these sites even have sitelinks.