What's the best way to hide affiliate links?

WagerX · 08-25-2007, 02:29 AM

I think I'm being penalized in google and yahoo because I have too many affiliate links with rel="nofollow" tags.

What's the best way to hide affiliate links? Java script? 301 internal redirect pages with rel="nofollow"?

Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

potchie · 08-25-2007, 09:12 AM

sorry but i have no idea..

bogs · 08-25-2007, 09:56 AM

scripts are still crawlable...

WagerX · 08-25-2007, 03:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bogs

scripts are still crawlable...

Thanks, too bad because I suspect my sites are getting Labelled as "affiliate site" losing PR. I think this is why one of my sites was banned in Yahoo.

Mihai · 08-26-2007, 10:11 AM

I am really curious if anyone is going to answer this thread

backgammonnn123 · 08-26-2007, 11:41 AM

What about embedding the affiliate links in your content. For instance make your main keywords hyperlinks that will go to your affiliate product page?

zibblu · 08-27-2007, 01:59 AM

I do not think you are being penalized for using "nofollow."

Consider this: Wikipedia, one of the most popular sites on the internet with huge PR scores and great Google rankings, has pretty much every outgoing link on their site rel="nofollow" now.

As far as hiding your affiliate links - you may want to hide them from your real human surfers... as some don't like clicking on the "weird" affiliate links. Or others are aware of affiliate marketing and don't want to help you make a sale (for whatever reason.) I don't think this sort of thing happens as much as paranoid affiliate marketers sometimes think but it probably does happen sometimes. Anyway you can hide your link in an onsite page like site.com/affiliatesite.html - that page will just be a javascript to open your affiliate link.

Red_Virus · 08-27-2007, 06:35 AM

Hi Guys, Check the blog post that I made some days back...

link removed

This is the best method & the most easiest one to implement also.

Grumps · 08-27-2007, 06:43 AM

There are several methods but i doubt anyone is going to contribute to evil.

Red_Virus · 08-27-2007, 06:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grumps

There are several methods but i doubt anyone is going to contribute to evil.

I just did, I think that the PHP method is the best one...

Even I am learning, so wanna learn if there are some better methods.

zagu060807 · 08-28-2007, 01:01 PM

How about disallowing all crawlers using robots.txt?

ivenms · 09-05-2007, 07:41 AM

Iam suggesting the best way to hide affiliate link:

Use the Tool: [link removed]

The tool is simple and easy to use.

With that, you can hide your affiliate link, shorten your long link....

A working example:

Turn this URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=what+...ient=firefox-a

Into this Cute Link: http://cutelink.info/Love.html

Steven_D · 09-05-2007, 12:52 PM

why dont u find something better to do than diddle around with affiliates and trying to beat the google bot system

Fact: If you intentionally try and hide links / deceive google bot, basically be sneeky and get a crappy site crawled when it shouldnt be, you will get banned.

The bot might not do it for you, but webmasters now have the ability to report spam and deceitful sites, and they are virtually beging for webmasters to do it.

and if you got banned from yahoo, if you get baned from google you would be pretty much buggered by my calculation.

If your linking to these sites and they are "bad neighbours" then you will loose PR. I dont think you loose PR just for having outgoing links, those web directories have a good 50000+ outgoing links, the no follow attribute has nothing to do with it.

The best thing that you could do is have 3 pages that have sparse amount of information on them, block them with robots.txt and put all your links on those 3 pages, google wont see them, you users still will, if you can get them to those three pages, just dont make it your main page.

Better yet, make a website that provides a service and is a benefit to the online community and you will earn more money than affiliates will pay you

Trapped · 09-05-2007, 03:34 PM

Penalized because you use rel="nofollow" to the affiliate links? That doesn't make much sense. Anyway if you want to hide affiliate links you can do that with a easy tweak on .htaccess (check the banners on the right sidebar of my seo blog to see how it will look).

Anyway i still don't get the penalized for using rel="nofollow"

@Steve D I think you are overreacting here. The guy was simply asking how to "mask" URLs not to hide the URLs from human eyes. There is nothing wrong in masking affiliate URLs and applying a rel="nofollow" to them.

roky · 09-05-2007, 07:03 PM

thanks man...........i thnk its helpful to many of us....