Affiliate links and Panda

[danielparry]

Hello all, my question relates to the recent panda changes and the subsequent impact on pages with affiliate links.

I have a hub of pages on my website talking about parcel delivery. Each page has unique, quality content and up until about 3 weeks ago they were starting to achieve strong rankings. We then decided to add some affiliate links (just 3) on each of the 5 parcel related pages we have. The rankings for each of these pages have tanked completely; rather than top 20, we're now outside of the top 100 for all of them.

When we noticed this we masked the link, changing it to domain.com/index/affiliate; we also no followed the link. Alas this has had minimal effect in restoring the rankings.

What i'm now thinking of doing is removing the affiliate links from the parcel landing pages altogether and instead providing users with a no followed link to another page within the site upon which we would have the affiliate links. This page would also be no indexed as well.

My question is: Is this a good idea and if so will it restore my previous rankings over time, or have those pages (as a result of the affiliate links) been permanently down graded?? Any assistance would be gratefully received!

[eyepaq]

Hi,

I had the same issue with a client very recently.

In my case the issues was 100% the outgoing traffic via affiliate links as after total removal the traffic went back up. (also after a re-inclusion request)

If you do add no-follow and send the link to a no index no follow internal page and on this page you place the affiliate links google will still know the "road" that the visitor took so it will still see the behavior (from the tool bar and referral source)

The best approach in my case was to reduce the number of affiliate links, add new non affiliate resources, other links to good sources on the subject, "dress" everything in a nice user friendly UX so overall the outgoing traffic will not only be affiliate channels and it looks like in Google's eyes this is natural and ok.

Now the traffic is more then previous levels (also based on some new clean link building sessions). It could be just a spike as this was very recently but still.... the traffic before the link building campaigns was at the same level as before.

Hope it helps.

[danielparry]

Hi Journeyman

Many thanks for the reply and the advice, which begs another question!

If Google can still see the road that the visitor takes to the no index no followed page where I intend to place the affiliate links will it restore the authority and therefore ranks of the parcel related landing pages where I originally placed the links, or will it still devalue these pages on account of the fact that we are linking from them to pages with affiliate links?

I have no intention of trying to achieve rankings for the no indexed page where I want to place the affiliate links but I desperately want to restore the parcel related pages for which previously I had some good rankings.

My understanding was that Google determines the value on a page by page basis so my thought was that if I remove the affiliate links from the landing page and then provide a to an internal page with the affiliate links it might restore the authority of the landing page even if it attributes zero value / authority to the other internal page on which I want to place the links?

Hope that makes sense!

Many thanks

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Daniel,

Is this still an issue that you are working to resolve? Panda and manual reviews of your site are unlikely to penalize you for one thing alone. There are a lot of purely affiliate sites out there with unmasked links that rank just fine.

There is some debate as to the negative impact of affiliate links, but I do prefer to hide them. If Google does know where they go, fine, but I also use it to make seeing the actual bounce rate on a page easier. And yes, they should always be nofollow.

I would recommend checking on the dates and seeing whether the drop in Google organic traffic aligns with one of the Panda updates. You then know if you need to focus on Panda issues or something else.

[bimmer540]

What do you think the best way is to hide them?

When I link to an affiliate, I have the link on my page go to a page in a directory like /go, and I have the /go directory disallowed in robots.txt.

Then on the go page (/go/link1.php), I have the affiliate link in a meta refresh=0.

Is there a better way to do this?

[Gamer07]

I am 100% sure Google doesn't like a page with more than one or two affiliate links. I had a similar problem about 3 months ago and A/B testing twice clearly showed:

• Links from 10 to 3 : Better ranking.

• Links from 3 to 2: Even better ranking.

It doesn't matter at all if you nofollow them or use unmasked or 301 redirects, they just detect all sorts of aff. links.

[Gamer07]

don't use meta refresh. Use a 301 redirect. Google 301 and htaccess. If you're using a CMS, there are plugins for that.