Hi.
I have word press website and iam an affiliate with many companies.I heard that search engines don’t like the affiliate websites! I need the experts advice in this matter!
Should i use the wp plugins for link cloaking or leave it? or its enough if i use the rel=“nofollow” for my affiliate links?
Thanks
Search engines don’t have anything against affiliate links, they just want to know not to pay attention to them. Google isn’t stupid, it knows that there are good reasons why people want to use affiliate links and it isn’t going to penalise people for doing so, as long as everything is kept above board.
You should always mark then as rel=“nofollow” – that’s an open and honest way to tell Google to ignore them. I don’t know how that WP plugin works, but cloaking the links is more likely to be seen as something dodgy, and indicates that you are trying to break the rules in some way – this is more likely to lead to your site being penalised than if you just use rel=“nofollow”.
Hi.
Thanks for writing.I have one more question! How can i protect my affiliate links? if cloaking is not good idea,is there anyway to protect my links?
What do you mean “protect your links”?
Protect your affiliate links so others can’t steal your affiliate commision
And how do you forsee the links being stolen?
will to be honest with you i don’t have more information about this.I just read an article about it. Check this one pls http://www.webmasters-central.com/article-blog/internet-marketing/affiliate-link-cloaking-protect-or-hide-your-affiliate-links/
check this one pls : http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/188998-stealing-affiliate-links.html
You can obfuscate or redirect links to make it harder to figure out where they’re going which may confuse some software program that’s been designed to replace links [spyware usually] but at the end of the day if I want to replace your affiliate ID I’m the one clicking the link and I can change it or simply get my own link and use it to override the cookie set by yours.
Google have no problem if you are using affiliate links at your website but promoting your page may be banned due to spam.
Search engines don’t have anything with affiliate links as long as the link don’t outnumber the written text. My point: as long as you are decent and do not post to many link ( so the site will look like a link farm ) you will be ok.
I would suggest to use “no follow”