Best way to nofollow affiliate links?

[2bloggers]

I don't "nofollow" affiliate links but I have quite a few. Doing them one by one would just be an impossible job. Would it be best to get a plugin that nofollows EVERYTHING? What would google prefer? I need to DOFOLLOW some links because those sites deserve it.

[Everett]

I would not nofollow "everything" on your site, as in every outbound link, affiliate or not. However, if you can find a plugin that will nofollow every "affiliate" link, you could go back and manually remove the nofollow link on those you wish to editorially endorse - though "technically" you shouldn't have a financial arrangement with them.

Much of the time affiliate links go through some sort of redirect that blocks pagerank anyway, such as a 302, or a redirect to a blocked folder, etc... This is typical with most of the larger affiliate networks.

[2bloggers]

I want to dofollow links to great blog posts or websites - NOT affiliate links. I cannot find a plugin that nofollows affiliate links. Any suggestions? Amazon does not redirect and I have a lot of Amazon affiliate links.

[Everett]

If it's Amazon you are concerned with you could probably just leave them as-is. However, you could also run a scan of your site using a tool like Screaming Frog or OSE and look for outbound links going to Amazon.com and other known affiliate sites. This will at least make tracking them down to manually update them easier.

You could probably have this done at the database level too, though that is something for which you'll probably want to hire a DBA.

The following article has the best idea I could find for your situation, though it still isn't perfect because you could be applying a nofollow meta tag (as opposed to a nofollow link attribute) to pages that have both affiliate links AND editorial links that you want followed. At any rate, I hope this helps: http://www.bradlinder.net/2011/05/how-to-add-nofollow-attribute-to-all.html