Nofollow affiliate links

[sparrowdog]

I am setting up an affiliate program using software built in to my shop already (x-cart). The links generated by the software do not have the rel="nofollow" in them. I'm assuming they should have?

When looking at Amazon, there must be millions of links out there pointing back to Amazon and all those links are followed back to them for link juice.

Am I missing something? Surely best practice here is to re="nofollow" so you're not seen to be manipulating Google PageRank?

[ProductPearson]

Amazon is a reputable site and has a ridiculous amount of links pointing at it, so I don't see why they'd have to be no-follow.

I'm not sure how advertising an Amazon product and linking to their product page is manipulating.

[sparrowdog]

If you're an Amazon affiliate it is.

By having millions of links to their website where people are being paid to do so, they're encouraging the manipulation of Google PageRank. I don't see why the rules should be any different for them because they're reputable. My site is reputable too. It's an online store with a 7 figure annual turnover, I'm just not 'Amazon'.

So I was just curious as to why they take the link juice from their affiliate links when the rest of us are encouraged to nofollow them. Everything I have read so far suggests that if you run an affiliate program, all the links where people link back to your store should be nofollow, and if you're running a blog that's got lots of affiliate links on it, you should protect your blog by adding nofollow links to all your advertising.

My in-house software doesn't nofollow by default, so I'm either going to have to get it re-written or give my affiliates manual instructions on how to alter their code. I chose not to use ClixGalore or anyone else like that so I don't have to pay their fees.

[ProductPearson]

It shouldn't be too hard to add the extra element to the URL that is generated for each affiliate program that you use.

Are you bringing in that figure from just affiliate sales? If so, well done, its a very admirable amount.

[sparrowdog]

I wish! The affiliate program is new. It's an unknown entity for me. 7 figures is just normal sales. The in-house software has the capacity to allow the blogger to choose a product and create custom code and a thumbnail for it to put in their site, like Amazon does, but they'll have to add the nofollow by hand or I will need to pay to have the software modified, which is what I'll probably end up doing. I have no desire to get a manual penalty for manipulating page rank and I'm surprised it's not a part of the software already.

[ProductPearson]

Well, I believe you could also simply change the URL structure, so it would be something like:

domain.com/product/out/amazon

I believe this is known as cloaking, and Yoast mentioned a bit about it:

https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/

You could potentially remove ugly affiliate links as well as solve the no-follow issue as it wouldn't be a direct link to Amazon.

[RobertFisher]

This was truly a very well answered question. I had never read the Yoast post, but it is great. Well done and Thank You.

Robert

[Everett]

I would always nofollow any affiliate links. You can send them through an internal redirect first, which can be blocked in the robots.txt file. That's mainly if you just don't want them to know it's an affilaite link at all, and helps with internal tracking.

Either way, don't give Amazon.com followable affiliate links.