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Went Hot: November 13, 2007 - 9:01 am
Posted By: Sebastian 374 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://sebastians-pamphlets.com)
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Just because you believe that you're not paranoid, that does not mean Google will not chase you down. Not knowing respectively not understanding Google's 12 commandments doesn't prevent you from being spanked for sins you've never heard of.
Thus don't deliver different (editorial) contents to users and crawlers, but also don't serve ads to crawlers. They just don't buy your eBook or whatever you sell, unless search engines send out Web robots with credit cards able to understand AJAX, respectively authorized to fill out and submit Web forms.
Your uncloaked ads look plain ugly with dotted borders in firebrick, hence don't apply rel="nofollow" to links when the requestor is not a search engine crawler. The engines are happy with machine-readable disclosures, and you can discuss everything else with the FTC yourself.
Do not allow search engine crawlers to follow your affiliate links, paid links, nor other disliked votes as per search engine guidelines. Of course condomizing such links is not your responsibility, but getting penalized for not doing Google's job is not exactly funny.
3 Comments
Comments
Are you saying that a product owner with an affiliate program should include rel=nofollow in the affiliate material he gives out for people to put on their sites? AND, at the same time, I should go to my blog and "nofollow" my links to the Craigslist, Youtube, etc stuff on the side?
Sounds like a good idea to me. Ever see, or know, someone who get penalized specifically for this or do they just warn you about it back at Google TOS but don't really do anything about it unless it's blatant and they catch you?
Product owners with an affiliate program usually won't nofollow their affiliate links, because they hope that here and there a link might pass some link juice by accident. From Google's perspective they're link buyers, though.
And yes, condomizing your outgoing affiliate links is a good idea, both from an SEO perspective as well as to comply to Google's paid links policy. On your blogspot outlet you could use an adserver running on one of your own domains to output the ads with simple JavaScript calls you can paste into your blogger template.
Check out Andy's site http://andybeard.eu/ (he somewhat owns the topic) or any SEO blog for coverage of signals from Google respectively penalties for affiliate links, paid links, and whatnot.
Thanks