How to deal with Affiliate Links without ruining your rankings!

You are affiliate Marketer? Most of the bloggers are. Like me…

Affiliate marketing is one of the best methods to make passive money from blogging. If you are regular reader of this blog then you might be knowing that Currently I am running one Series in which I am sharing everything that happens with my Affiliate site 1.

How to deal with Affiliate Links without ruining your rankings!

Affiliate site 1 is the site I have started publicly to share my experience on how I ranked on #1 for targeted keyword. From niche research to current rankings, I have shared everything. Leaving this off, let me tell you one thing, One Interesting fact!

Google Hates Affiliate links! We can’t say that because if you are Amazon affiliate marketer than You will not face such problems from google because google knows some big affiliate networks so that they know how affiliate market works!

But if you are connected with the affiliate network about which google is not aware about, you may face problem like I am facing currently on my site. I used to think that why My site isn’t ranking enough, Researched a lot and found that google may have problems with affiliate links.

Now let me tell you that Google doesn’t have direct problem with Affiliate links but it has problem with paid links. If your affiliate links on your site looks like advertisements, you will get badly penalized. Another thing is you will not get any type of notifications about this penalty.

Penalty includes the drop of the rankings of your site. I mean, If you will be ranking on the 3-4th page, you will find your site at the 26-30-32 etc pages after penalty.

Recently I found out that I have same problem. I am not sure about this but I edited the homepage and found out the solution of dealing with affiliate links after research and some old memories. So, let me tell you how to deal with affiliate links without ruining your rankings.

1. Cloak them!

Instead of giving them direct link, Give them In-direct link. I mean, Make virtual links that will just redirect the virtual link to the main link.

For example, My mailerlite Affiliate Link is, “ https://www.kadvacorp.com/technology/digital-ocean-cloud-review/ ” but if you will visit “ https://www.kadvacorp.com/category/web-hosting/ ”, Finally you will be re-directed the the first link which is original one.

So, How it is possible, It’s hell easy if you are using wordpress. In wordpress, there is one plugin named Better links which will help you do to so.

To add new link, you just have to install the original link and then the virtual link and you are ready to go. Here is How you can do so in easy way!

This is what you have to do after installing Better links plugin on your wordpress to make virtual link pointing to your main affiliate link. By this way, CTR will also get increased! Your users will come to know that where exactly the link is pointing.

The second solution is to nofollow the affiliate links! Google is against the paid links and sometimes google consider affiliate link a paid links! You will get penalized if it will happen in your case.

In case if you are not using the WordPress and your CMS doesn’t have such plugin, you can manually code in PHP. You also have to disallow search engines from robots.txt to crawl the folder in which you are having your link files!

2. Nofollow the Affiliate links!

The banners you will get from your network will not be nofollow! You have to turn the link to nofollow to stop passing the link juice to your affiliate network. It may be harmful for you to make your affiliate links dofollow. You may get penalized by google.

The logic behind not gettting penalized for nofollow links is, Paid links are dofollow. Google is against the paid links. Companies pay you to give them dofollow link so that they can get better rankings in google.

By Turning your affiliate links to nofollow, there will be no chances to get penalized because Nofollow links never pass link juice nor they are paid!

So, turning your affiliate links into cloaked nofollow links will help you to get out of penalty moreover, you will not face any penalty due to affiliate links in future too!

Conclusion: I was not aware about the problems we face by using affiliate links! Recently I researched about it a lot and came to know about it. So, this is how you can save your site from getting penalized by google due to affiliate links! If you have any question related to this, you can comment it down and I will solve it!..