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rel="nofollow" for Affiliate Links?
Hi - do you recommend to put a nofollow attribute to the affiliate links?
Besides not "draining link power" of your other links, could it be an advantage regarding Google (they stated that they do not like pure affiliate sites, and maybe the nofollow tag prevents the spider to understand that it is crawling an affiliate site)?
"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
It would "drain your link power" if you did that.
You should only use nofollow for links to destinations you don't trust or don't want to add value to, but nofollow will NOT preserve your PageRank.
BTW -- Google just doesn't like THIN affiliate sites. They crawl and index plenty of robust affiliate sites.
Free advice and opinions are provided without any warranties or guarantees. I cannot do anything about the facts.
So you dont use "nofollow" for your affiliate links?Originally Posted by Michael Martinez
What I don't understand: If links drain link power, and if nofollow does not give link power to another site, why should using nofollow on some links not increase the link strenght of the other outgoing links?
"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
I know that I do not stand a chance with a one-page website. Maybe I can hope to get a couple of visitors a month...
The reason I asked the above question is that as a follow-up to this thread: Undeveloped own domains: 301 redirect to your main site or better alternatives? I set up a one-page-website with three affiliate links on it. I know that more content would be better, but I thought that putting up one site with 500 words on it is better than doing nothing at all with that dormant domain (I focus my time on my main site + on my blog).
If you have suggestions, especially what to do with unused, dormant domains, I am very open to your ideas.
"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
From what I understand, nofollow links do not conserve "link power". When you use nofollow on a link the power that link would have been given is dissipated across the web instead.
The "link power" moves out of the site through links whether you nofollow them or not.
This is correct, afaik. Nicely worded explanation too.
The whole business with using nofollow to conserve PageRank was nonsense anyway. There are a lot of people in the SEO industry who slap a load of crap on their blogs and strut it out at conferences and act like they know what they are doing when, in fact, they're just getting by on pure dumb luck and more hard work than they would need to put into their projects if they just stopped trying to act like Real Algorithm Chasers.
nofollow was proposed as a way for bloggers to strip link spammers of some of the value they were stealing from blogs by leaving links in comments. It only prevented search engines from crawling those links and passing PageRank from the blogs to the spam destinations. But those links remained in place, creating visibility and sometimes sending traffic to truly unworthy sites.
A couple of years ago nofollow was proposed as a tool for "sculpting PageRank", which was a truly stupid monstrosity that very bad, incompetent SEOs were using to hide the fact that they could not figure out how to optimize really badly designed sites. Their pathetic excuse was that they were not allowed to change the badly designed sites (but the CORRECT solution in that situation is to obtain more value-passing links from other sites).
Earlier this year, after noticing the widespread abuse of nofollow by SEOs (meaning, Google detected a lot MORE screwed up Web sites that were hurting themselves in the search results by using it), Google decided to dis-incentivize nofollow by forcing it to dissipate 1 links' worth of PageRank to the rest of the Web.
Whereas before nofollowed links were treated as if they didn't exist, now they are treated as if they are holes in your bucket, forcing the PageRank to flee your Web site even faster than it normally would (you cannot, under any circumstances, prevent your site from pushing PageRank to other sites).
It will unfortunately take about 2 years for all the bad, stupid, insane arguments in favor of using nofollow to "sculpt" PageRank to be shouted down and corrected as newbie after newbie reads those old blog posts and asks in forums and on blogs if they can still do this.
And even then some people won't get the message.
No one should be basing their search engine optimization on PageRank. If you think that's what it's all about, you've been reading the wrong SEO blogs and tutorials. You need some PageRank to get your site crawled, indexed above the Supplemental Results Index, and recrawled. You don't need to try and concentrate PageRank into a small number of pages.
That's a completely idiotic approach and there is absolutely nothing "optimal" about trying to manage your internal linking that way.
SO WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH AFFILIATE LINKS?
Affiliate links are a very special case. People are afraid the search engines may identify their sites as "affiliate sites" and demote them in the search results if the search engines find affiliate links. For a site that has little to no content per page, that's pretty much what happens.
If you put a lot of relevant, informative text on your page and work your affiliate links into the design and theme of the copy, you should be fine.
Some affiliates, however, don't want to help their merchants outrank them. In that case, either use non-competitive anchor text or use nofollow -- but use it with the understanding that you are giving up a little bit of PageRank you otherwise could have channeled through the rest of your site before it moved on to the rest of the Web.
You cannot keep the PageRank. It's not yours. It doesn't belong to you. You don't need to keep it anyway. It does its thing and it moves on. Think of it like water flowing through your yard. No matter how many boards you put up along your fence, that water will still seep through holes, drain away into the ground, and/or evaporate into thin air.
That is exactly what happens with PageRank. People really need to stop thinking in terms of "what can I do with my PageRank".
Just build a really solid internal navigation system that helps your visitors get from one page to the next and the PageRank will take care of itself.
Free advice and opinions are provided without any warranties or guarantees. I cannot do anything about the facts.
Really great post there Michael.
Great post Michael.
But what happens if you like some of us affiliates link to a folder/file on our server using a 301 (redirect) to the affiliate site.
Example: <a href="/visit/pokerstars/">Visit PokerStars</a> vs <a href="/visit/pokerstars/" rel="nofollow">Visit PokerStars</a>
I have a 301 php code in the /pokerstars/ folder sending the player to my affiliate link.
If I haven't put a nofollow tag in my <a href="/visit/pokerstars/">Visit PokerStars</a> link then Google would count this page as a page of my domain and you would end up with a lot of no good pages with no content right?
Maybe it's a better idea to block the /visit/ folder in robots.txt instead of putting nofollow tags on each external 301 redirect link?
By adding this you violate the TOS of many rooms which state you are not allowed to alter any of the link code you are given. If you use rel="nofollow" your account can be terminated immediately according to these agreements. Does it happen? no, but you affiliates have zero clout when it comes to arguing about anything with these rooms because almost 100% of the members here are in violation in some way. They can do whatever they want to you.
You agree to use the entire code provided to you in connection with the Marketing Materials. You will not modify or alter the code for Widgets, Banner Ads, or Text Links, or otherwise modify any other Marketing Materials without our prior written consent.
"There's something about an underdog that really inspires the unexceptional."
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