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Well if you would hide it from only Google that would be cloaking to a certain extend. But in this case I think you can easily get away with it as it will improve the user experience.

Hi there. Google won't penalize you for that, it simply won't display it, if it's against their rules.

I would suggest not disavowing a list of this size. My suggestions to you would be to create a robots.txt file and upload it to Google search console. This way you can continue to get traffic from the affiliate site, but it will tell Google not to crawl the domain. Hope this helps, if you have additional questions please feel free to ask. Chris Hickman GetBackonGoogle.com

Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value. But note the point they had not mentioned what will they do with low quality links. From the above points it clear that Google will passes a link juice. But still many of us in affiliate industry uses a parameters and redirects in affiliate urls. Reason is just simple not all the affiliate are as genuine or reputed as Amazon. So if your links in 50 sites and may be 40 site can be those which Google does not like so links from those site may harm your site. So as I said above its always good to save website's image while leaving some link juice.

Hi there Google offers great resources for migrating a site with URL changes, I would review that to get a high level idea of what you need to do from a search engine standpoint. URLs with keywords are usually the way to go, so in this case it would be the product names. Here are two great resources on Moz for URL best practices (1 / 2). I have seen the move from parameter to keyword based URLs work substantially better from a search engine perspective because search engines (and USERS) value the keywords in URLs. They are easier to read, crawl, link to, and so on. You really can't go wrong with it. I would first categorize the parameters by patterns. This could be anything from a category to a product to a color, etc. That way, when you're setting up redirects, you're not scrambling to figure out what parameters are; you already know that you're focused on categories or products and to go from there. It also helps set up your redirect file in a more organized fashion so should you need to change anything, you can quickly find what you're looking for. I would review the resources above and discuss with your IT team about your capabilities. From there, get a gameplan of schedules, responsibilities, testing your redirects, and benchmarking traffic / keyword rankings so you can gauge success post migration. Let me know if this helps or if you have any questions or comments - good luck! Patrick

Hi there. Do you see any negative results so far? Any hints at it? How spammy are those links (anchor text, DA/PA of linking pages etc)? Did/do you have manual actions taken by GWT/search console? How is your MOZ OSE spam score? What I would recommend, if you have a suspicion that disavowing those links would help, is to disavow small part of them, let's say 100-200 and see the effects on your rankings, DA/PA and other metrics. Hope this helps.

Hi Brett, I've the same situation with a client. We focused on the singular and ranked higher with the plural. Of course the optimization were done for the singular keyword. The reasons we found: CTR in serps, Search volume, lower in this case Several links with the plural keyword. hope it helps.

As Stephen mentioned there's not an exact time frame on how quickly the changes will be seen. We at GetBackonGoogle.com submit many disavow lists for many different quality sites. Every site responds different, and it's important to continue building new, high quality links. Show the search engines you're making the proper changes and playing by their rules. Did you try having the site remove the link, before adding it to a disavow list? Often when you see the rankings jumping around that's a good sign. Search engines are moving your listing around to see where it fits properly. This is a great time to monitor the bounce rate and time on page. Make sure users are staying on the page and clicking through to additional pages, search engines will notice these things. Nick Adficient.com

Have a read of what Google say about them here. And yes, image search is huge. As for the way it's used, I can't comment on what everyone else does. -Andy

Thanks for the contribution Patrick - I am gonna go ahead and disavow the domain, as well as the affiliate link.