Affiliates Links and Google

[Murk]

Hey guys,

Here's a heads up. I recently decided to do some dumb sh_t like allow google bot to crawl entire site by removing some restrictions from robot.txt. I got nothing to hide right?

Great, soon after my site was hit by a manual action for using a link "cloaker", the resulting action is labelled "Pure Spam". I removed the link manager plug-in and manually re-linked Affiliates. That was over 2 weeks ago, no word on reconsideration yet.

Wait a sec, I don’t stop there!,

Your like, "this guy can't get dumber!", yeh.. I do.

This cloaking plugin is common on all my affiliate sites. So I decide to be proactive and spend hours repairing my cloaked links with naked affiliate links. I mean, I read a few things and even watched a video where Matt Sluts clearly states, Google doesn’t consider affiliate links when ranking...Wrong!



This is almost across the board.

 

[Sutra]

I don't know much about the link cloaking thing. But I do place Amazon affiliate links all over my site and they don't hurt my rankings. 500 word articles have 3 affiliate links. 1000 word articles have 4 - 6 affiliate links. Don't know if that's generally considered a large or small quantity of affiliate links, so maybe it's really small and what I'm saying doesn't mean shit, haha.

 

[built]

Were you using redirects? like pretty links etc?

 

[Golan]

soon after my site was hit by a manual action for using a link "cloaker", the resulting action is labelled "Pure Spam"

Did they formulate it this way - "manual action for using a link cloaker"? Or how does it sound?

 

[Murk]

Were you using redirects? like pretty links etc?

Ur on the money, Pretty links. This site has been my main earner for 3yrs, Pretty links has been there from the get'go

Did they formulate it this way - "manual action for using a link cloaker"? Or how does it sound?

No, but this site is super clean, cloaking is the only possiblity

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think the key to pulling this off without problem is three-fold:

1) Your redirects need to have an obvious relation to where they are landing in terms of context of the surrounding content and anchors (of course you have this). But also your redirect URL should reflect the situation too. So something like...

- mysite.com/amazon/product-name
- mysite.com/out/product-name​

2) Your redirects (and even if you don't cloak them) should always be no-follow. Otherwise they look like paid links. You can block this folder with robots.txt as well.

3) These redirects should never be 301 redirects. These imply a permanence and a relation with the site you're redirecting to beyond what actually exists. A 302 redirect is what you want, which tells the bots that this is a temporary redirection that's being monitored actively and is subject to change.

TL;DR:

• Sensible content
• Sensible anchor text
• Descriptive URL
• No-Follow
• 302 Redirects

Also, if your site is set up as "ProductReviews.net" and is constructed of almost entirely comparison tables and review posts in addition to any of the problems above, you're looking at an eventual "Thin Content Penalty" as well. I believe this has to do with the ratio of affiliate links to other OBLS and the ratio against the amount of indexed content too.

 

[knownerror]

Block crawlers in robot.txt for your redirects such as domain.com/go/product01/ (You'd block /go/). Never had a single problem.

 

[Murk]

moral of the story,

1. don't be as honest as google wants you to be
2. use the robot.txt to block sensitive stuff
3. if you dont think aff'links effect rankings, this is a very clear case
   
4. always use soap-ona-rope, or keep a tube of lube ready