Warning on Google Support Groups bad advice about affiliate links

[Michael Martinez]

Rarely have I seen a group of people so unhelpful, so ignorant, and so misinformative as the "top posters" in Google's Support Groups.

The Google employees, when they post, usually provide helpful guidance. The rest of what you find there in the form of feedback and analysis from the popular contributors is absolute garbage.

Just today Search Engine Roundtable highlighted a discussion in one of the Google Support Groups where a guy complained that all his sites had mysteriously dropped out of the search results.

The "top contributors" came up with two nonsense theories: first, that he had affiliate links that don't use nofollow. Second, that he was running a "domain farm" (the term is tossed around by people with no idea of what it means -- as near as I can determine, it supposedly has something to do with interlinking domains you own).

Neither theory was correct. Googler JohnMu pointed out that the guy was selling links without using "nofollow". Google wants people to use "nofollow" on any links they sell.

Unfortunately, the Search Engine Roundtable article followed the affiliate link theory and a lot of people will now probably assume that Google has taken aim at undisclosed affiliate links.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Googlers have said in the past they don't have a problem with affiliate links. If you want to nofollow your affiliate links so you don't pass anchor text and pagerank to the merchant domains, that's fine. That is your prerogative.

But if you start to see people panicking about getting penalized for not using nofollow on affiliate links, don't believe the hysteria.

Dig deeper. In the discussion I mention above, someone found the guy's rate card and he wrote "I only sell dofollow links". A Google employee then stepped in to point out that was the problem.

I can't promise that affiliate links will always be safe with Google, but I just don't ever see Google employees caring about affiliate links. Affiliate links are usually pretty easy to identify. If the search engines want to do something about affiliate links, that's more an issue for the merchants than for the affiliates.

[pipeline]

Oh yea man, the google support group people are fucking dingbats. You ask a question and they'll tell you have a penalty caused by bad wording on your 404 page, lol. Johnmu does at least give some advice worth listening to.