John Mueller of Google answered a question about whether affiliate links have a negative impact on rankings, touching on factors that affiliate sites should consider.
Assumption: Google targets affiliate sites
There is a decades-old assumption that Google targets affiliate sites. SEOs have been talking about it since Pubcon Orlando 2004 and longer on SEO forums.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that Google wasn’t targeting affiliate sites, but rather the quality level of sites that followed certain tactics like keyword stuffing, organized link rings, automated scaled content, etc.
Image representing a low quality site
The idea that Google targets affiliate sites persists, probably because many affiliate sites tend to lose rankings with each update. But it’s also true that these same affiliate sites have shortcomings that marketers may or may not be aware of.
It is these shortcomings that John Mueller’s answer implies affiliates should focus on.
Do too many affiliate links hurt rankings?
This is the question:
“…do many affiliate links hurt a page’s ranking?”
Google’s John Mueller responded:
“We have a blog post from about 10 years ago about this, and it’s just as relevant now. The short version is that having affiliate links on a page doesn’t make your pages useless or bad, and it doesn’t makes pages useful automatically.
You need to make sure that your pages can stand on their own, that they’re actually useful and useful in the context of the web and for your users.”
Pages that can stand on their own
The thing with some affiliate marketers who run into ranking problems is that even though they “did everything perfect,” many of their ideas of perfection come from reading blogs that recommend outdated tactics.
Note that today, in 2024, there are some SEOs who still insist that Google uses simple click-through rates as a ranking factor, as if AI hasn’t been part of Google’s algorithm for the past 10 years, insisting as if machine learning couldn’t use clicks to create classifiers that can be used to predict what content is most likely to satisfy users.
What are common outdated tactics?
These are, in my opinion, the kind of tactics that can lead to unhelpful content:
Targeting keywords not people
Keywords, in my opinion, are the starting point for identifying topics that interest people. Google does not rank keywords, but instead ranks content that deals with the topics and concepts associated with those keywords. An affiliate, or anyone else, who begins and ends their content by targeting keywords is inadvertently creating content for search engines, not people, and lacks the elements of utility and usefulness that Google’s signals are looking for.
Copy competitors
Another tactic that is more harmful than helpful are those that advise site owners to copy what their ranking competitors are doing and then do it ten times better. Basically this is simply giving Google what it already has in the search results and it’s the kind of thing that Google won’t find unique or original and risks being discovered/not indexed at worst and ranked in page two or three at best.
The essence of beating a competitor is not to copy them, but to do something that users appreciate that the competitors are not doing.
Takeaway food:
The following are my takeaways, my take on three ways to do better in research.
Don’t just target keywords.
Focus on the people searching for those keywords and what their needs are.
Don’t research your competitors to copy what they do.
Research your competitors to identify what they’re not doing (or doing wrong) and make that your competitive strength.
Don’t just build links to promote your site to other sites.
Promote your sites to real people. Identify where your typical site visitor might be and identify ways to get your website out there. The promotion does not start or end with links.
What does Google say about affiliate sites?
Mueller said he wrote something ten years ago but didn’t link to it. Good luck finding it.
But Google has published content on the subject, and here are a few things to keep in mind.
1. Use the rel=sponsored link attribute. The next one is from 2021:
“Affiliate links to pages such as product reviews or shopping guides are a common way for blogs and publishers to monetize their traffic. In general, using affiliate links to monetize a website is fine. We ask to sites participating in affiliate programs that qualify these links with rel=”sponsored”, regardless of whether these links were created manually or dynamically.
As part of our ongoing effort to improve product-related search rankings and better reward high-quality content, when we find sites that don’t meet the appropriate requirements for affiliate links, we may take manual actions to prevent them from these links affect Search and our systems. it can also take algorithmic actions. Both manual and algorithmic actions can affect how we see a site in Search, so it’s good to avoid things that might trigger actions whenever possible.”
2. Google’s ten years of advice on affiliate programs and added value:
“If your site distributes content that is available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: “Does this site offer significant additional benefits that will make a user want to visit that site in search results instead of the original source of the content?” If the answer is “No,” the site may frustrate search engines and violate our quality guidelines. As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, to to maintain the quality of our users’ search results.
“Affiliated content on a site previously used by a government agency”
Do not abuse the reputation of the site:
“Embedding third-party ad units on a page or using affiliate links throughout a page, with links treated appropriately”
“Thin affiliate pages are pages with product affiliate links where product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value.”
5. Google has an entire webpage documenting how to write high-quality reviews:
Affiliate sites rank highly all the time
It is a fact that affiliate sites are usually ranked at the top of search results. It is also true that Google does not target affiliate sites, Google generally targets spam tactics and low quality content.
Yes, there are false positives and Google’s algorithms have room for improvement. But in general, it’s best to keep an open mind about why a site might not be ranking.
Listen to the Office Hours podcast at the 4:55 mark:
Featured image by Shutterstock/Dilen
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