Google says no penalty for using affiliate links without markup

[The Buzz]

Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, confirmed that websites won’t receive a manual penalty for publishing affiliate links without the recommended markup.

In a statement released last week, Mueller said:

“So, from our point of view, affiliate links fall into that category of something financial attached to the links, so we really strongly recommend to use this setup.

But, for the most part, if it doesn’t come across as you selling links, then it’s not going to be the case that we would manually penalize a website for having affiliate links and not marking them up.”

Search Engine Journal did its best to clarify any confusion:

The key takeaway here is that you should use either the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes when publishing affiliate links. Google recommends it, so you can’t go wrong by following that advice.

What Mueller is saying here is Google won’t go as far as to issue a manual penalty if this best practice isn’t followed.

Marking up affiliate links prevents your site from passing link equity to the other site.

That’s an important SEO best practice, as you should never pass link equity to sites that are incentivizing you to link to them.

If you’re linking to a page because you believe it provides value to your visitors, and you’re not receiving anything in return, then it’s not necessary to declare them with markup.

Read more here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/.../429907/#close

[wonderpunter]

So he should of just said something vahue like he usually does like "it doesnt really matter"

[astra]

Do people actually make affiliate links dofollow???
My affiliate plugin makes them noindex, nofollow by default.

[Pokerface]

Thought everyone was using nofollow ... easy enough to be compliant