Dallas, TX – In the recent episode of #AskGoogleBot, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, John Mueller, told a follower that there’s no need to hide affiliate links. This is in response to the follower’s question if he should hide affiliate links. Mueller provided two important points why affiliate links should not be hidden.
“Affiliate links are fine. It’s fine to use these to help monetize a website,” Mueller answered. “There are two important aspects to keep in mind, though.”
These two aspects include the need for a website to provide valuable and unique content and that affiliate links, just like paid links, should be declared not only to users but to search engines as well.
“First, your website should provide unique content and value of its own. It can be tempting to just republish a generic or low-quality description. But users expect to find something useful on your website too,” Mueller explained.
“Second, affiliate links, as with other paid links, should be declared. They should be declared both for users as well as for search engines. For users, it's worth checking with local regulations regarding what you need to do,” he further explained.
To declare an affiliate link to search engines, Mueller said it should use the rel=” nofollow” or rel=” sponsored” link attributes. These attributes qualify the outbound links to Google.
He also pointed out that there’s no need to use any weird scripts.
“There's no need to use any weird, automatic JavaScript, unclick handling, or cloaking to hide these. Just link and declare them so that the links can be treated appropriately.”
Mueller added that for those who use JavaScript to add affiliate links, they need to add the appropriate attributes, too.
One more important thing Mueller said in the video is about using affiliate links in product reviews.
“On this subject, often affiliate links are used within the context of product reviews. If that's the case for you, double-check our search documentation to see if any kinds of structured data might be appropriate to implement on your pages,” Mueller explained in detail.
KISS PR Brand Story wants its customers, especially affiliate marketers, to note what John Mueller said. As the company recently created a Product Review Marketplace for affiliate marketers, the need to keep a tab with Google’s linking policy is a must to avoid any problems in the future.
Qamar Zaman, CEO of KISS PR Brand Story, said that product reviews marketing requires compliance.
“Because product reviews marketing requires compliance, we have developed a playbook that will help keep the space regulated for our publishing partners.”
One of the challenges faced by product review publishers has to do with many unethical affiliate marketers who build backlinks by posting content first, then building low-quality backlinks that Google does not prefer. This is one of the main aspects of the industry that Zaman and his team wanted to minimize, if not eliminate.
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Published by: Agnes Zang
Source: kisspr
Release ID: 24943