Affiliate Links Are Do-Follow, Says Search Engine Engineers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 13 of October , 2008 at 7:22 am

Rand Fishkin reported this from the SMX conference:

Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value.

This is really not new search engine optimization related news to me. It may be to some folks. There may have been some issues in some places about affiliate links being approved for do-follow or not giving link juice. If so then it’s probably because those affiliates were using blackhat techniques or spamming the search engines. Remember, all the usual rules apply to affiliate links. If you want them to count then you should let your affiliate marketers know what are acceptable and what are un-acceptable methods of linking. Provide them with useful tools to use in their marketing efforts. That will go a long way to ensure that they use the proper linking techniques and you’ll get the link credit you deserve.

                      Category: Inbound Links, Link Building