Does affiliate links harm SEO

[IBT_Sports]

Correct on the no-follow and link juice leakage. We've run a few tests around this and found some subtle ...and I mean subtle, impacts in our SERPS. For a much larger impact on a Search strategy, your site should have a much larger authority, but nevertheless, its good practice to follow these changes regardless of your sites authority and SERPS.

We follow the same guidelines of no more than two links per page...where its applicable. Where its necessary, we could employ methods to prevent the link juice leakage, but honestly its felt its not worth the effort unless we see a steriod page (highy juiced).

If there a large concern around affiliate links leaking the juice and your SERPS impact, consider some of the tactics as javascript methods to prevent this (though Google now crawls JS files), flash or iframe...though I don't see any efficient methods to deploy this for a small or medium sized site.

[bauss]

Adding a "nofollow" tag to a affiliate link is common sense for anyone that works in SEO. You can also hide your affiliate URLS, and use a PHP redirect, and the affiliate links won't harm your site at all. So you'd have a URL that looks something like this for each affiliate link: yoursite.com/1/affiliate

[edgarf76]

I made my links no follow on my home page and bonus page. Does no follow work on banners?

[muffincrumbs]

If it has a link, which 99.99% do... Then yes of course!!

[casinovegas]

Just installed the Affiliate link cloaking plugin, going to give it a shot over the next few weeks, seems good as you can change one link across the whole site easier and you don;t have to add no follows to links.

[edgarf76]

Is this the correct one? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...link-cloaking/

I googled it and found a few option like this http://patchlog.com/wordpress/hidden-affiliate-links/

Please let us know how it is working for you,

Thank you

[casinovegas]

It's called Affiliate Link Cloaking. Search in plugins for Affiliate Link Cloaking and it's the first one

[muffincrumbs]

I love that plugin, but it can make your site load very slow. There is a way to use it, without having to edit your .ht access file to make pretty links, and not make your site load slow. http://flic.kr/p/ek4Pth << Here is an image of the optimal settings when adding a new link. De-select the auto replace box, and type the sort URL in your blog or website. The plugin has already writing the information it needs to mask the link, you should just put the sort form in your site manually, or it will load EVERYTIME ANY page is loaded on your site... making it really slow..... but that's why you have Muffin!
Add New ‹ Casino Bonus Review (CBR) by Jared Bates, on Flickr

[universal4]

Rather than use a plugin that slows a site, I just create a file (html or php) for each link needed and place them in a folder that is restricted by robots.txt.

The affiliate links are then hidden or masked, are internal links, and much fast then a call to the database server would be. )they should be no-followed also)

If links have to be changed or edited, only a single place just like using a plugin but without the extra load on the sql server.

Rick
Universal4

[muffincrumbs]

Very nice solution Rick! How do you make a file like that? Wordpress is the extent of my programming knowledge, with some html of course, I'm more of a optimization guy.

[universal4]

Here is the code for the php page.

 
<?php
header('Location: http://www.affiliatelink.com/');
?>

It can be as simple as this. Let's say you name the page visitcasino1.php and you place the file in a folder named visit.

Your link for casino1 would then be http://www.domain.com/visit/visitcasino1.php

Rick
Universal4

[GFPC]

<?php
header("Location: http://affiliatelink.com");
header("X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow", true);
?>

I would add another line in red just to make sure the link is not followed and indexed.
As well as the block from robots.txt. IN the past i have only done it in robots.txt and it still got indexed.

[casinovegas]

I haven't found the plugin too bad at slowing down site speed?

[indika]

Affiliate links can be treated similar to outgoing links, thus they can be harmful for SEO. A good practice of adding "no follow" attribute can help keeping the PR value of webpage intact.

[universal4]

Good point GFPC,

I listed the bare code, you can also list the title if you feel like it, but the noindex helps for those robots that wanna index stuff even when they are told not to follow.

Rick
Universal4

[muffincrumbs]

Thank you guys very much, I am going to try it on one of my smaller sites later tonight!