How Google Treats Affiliate Links In Terms Of SEO

Every blogger and webmaster has several ways in which he makes money online and affiliate links are one of them.Affiliate links are one of the best ways to make money from a site provided the website has a lot of traffic.Many of the new generation bloggers prefer to have affiliate ads rather than adsense ads as they feel there is more earning potential in affiliate ads rather than adsense or other ppc programs.Before we get into how Google treats affiliate links, let us discuss briefly what affiliate links are.

What Are Affiliate Links?

Affiliate links are those links which when clicked by a reader takes them to a landing page of a service or a product.If the reader buys said service or product, then the "referrer", which is you, get paid a commission from that.Obviously chances of this happening are lower than the chances of people clicking adsense ads, but usually affiliates pay out anywhere between 10-200$ in commissions which is why some bloggers prefer affiliate links.

Affiliate Link SEO - Matt Cutts

Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about the way in which Google treats affiliate links, in terms of passing on pagerank and SERP juice.

(PS: Take a look at those Penguin Dolls in front of Matt Cutts)

Let me breakdown what Matt Cutts had to say about the way in which Google handles Affiliate links.There are two types of affiliates -

Affiliates Recognized By Google
Unknown Affiliates

Affiliates Recognized By Google

There are several big affiliates such as HostGator, GoDaddy etc who are recognized by Google, so they can easily take care of the affiliate links going back to these affiliate networks.There is no doubt in Google's mind when it comes to these networks that they are affiliates.

Unknown Affiliates

These are affiliates who are not recognized by Google, they may be start up affiliates such as easywebcontent, which are not well known.For these kind of affiliates it may be better suited to add a rel="nofollow" code after the link as this will tell Google that you do not wish to pass on SERP juice to the link and hence proving it that it is not a paid link which is used to improve ratings, rather it behaves as an advertisement.

So this is probably all you need to know about how Google treats affiliate links in terms of SEO.If you have any information to add or have any suggestion to make, please leave a comment, all the comments are welcome!

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