Ranking drop after making all affiliate links no follow

hey everyone so I was hoping someone here could shed some light on this maybe there was some thing I wasn't aware of basically what happened was I had all of my affiliate links on one of my sites as do follow which was about 50 affiliate links in total throughout about 20 pages.

Well I decided to make all of the affiliate links no follow because of SEO advice from a bunch of people. I also decided to take the Amazon full affiliate link URL and instead start using the small URL which is more like www.AMzn.com/23425fsd. well the next morning I woke up and I've had the most ranking drops I've had in a year.

could it be that making links no follow sends Google a signal that you're manipulating your results and drops your ranking or could it be that I changed the affiliate link to be a short url Amazon link and that drops my rankings because its seen as a redirect?

maybe you are seen as a thin site now by panda due to the azon link

anyway whats keeping you from reversing the changes?

I can only tell you that Google reads HTML text and if content changes then rankings can get affected. However this is something that you should have done in the beginning itself. So i can't even say undo the changes. Continue like this and build more links. Maybe you will gain rankings again? BTW how much did you lose?

Already had amazon links in this format. amazon.com/blahblah blalbalh but these are long links so I opted to use the amazon url shortening amzn.com/blah

This is one site generating about 3k a month, organic traffic went down about 15-20% after this.

I'm scared to reverse it because of too much movement back and forth my google paranoia says that may be a signal

Stick with it for 2-3 weeks if nothing changes then switch back and report results

Not sure about what made the ranking drop, but you should not use amzn short links if the user doesn't know he is going to Amazon. So you are allowed to use them only if the button specify that they go to Amazon (ie: buy on amazon button).
However, if you use Amazon full link it is okay to not specify they go to Amazon because they see Amazon url when they hover the bottom.
It is their TOS, just my 2 cents to not get banned.

I'm watching this topic closely as I also use the "no follow" plugin on almost all my sites and a few of them have been shitting the bed in terms of rankings. Gunna remove the plugin and test out if it will have any impact. I made a thread earlier that sort of relates to this. Does the amount of affiliate links your site impact rankings? One of my site has close to 15 affiliate links on its homepage and I'm wondering if the affiliate links have any impact on rankings.

I think the sudden change just irritated Google a bit or it's the new Phantom Update. Anyway, using nofollow for affiliate links is the way Google wants it, so I'd no reverse the change, but wait.

I think getting a lot of aff links in a website affects the quality of the site. And it it's on the homepage, there's no wonder the site will tank further down the SERP.

For OP, my advise is get back to how things were when you're banking rather than worrying what happens next, as you're doing right now.

I would just leave it for now, Google may think that a large change happened on your website and it should go back to their original places soon. I also noticed something similar when I started using cloaked links on my site. I am pretty sure Google can tell they are affiliate links, followed or not.

Outbound do-follow links gives the giving site a bit of trust, regardless if it's an affiliate link or not, an outbound link is an outbound link.

So, if we go by the theory above, you had alot or quite a few outbound links (affiliate links, doesn't matter what link it is, what matters was they were outbound (going away from your site) and they were do follow) that were pointing outwards from your site, thereby diluting your potential juice but increasing the sites trust, when you no-follow the links, the site loses its credibility and loses its trust gained from giving out a do-follow link therefore depending on the authority of your site, it could suffer from minor decreases in the SERPs, if you don't want to reverse the changes, then don't but instead, go through your articles and add some do follow links to authority sites such as wikipedia or some fellow sites in your niche, that should help build your sites trust up again, it will not happen instantly, it'll take a couple of month to recover.

ComputerJunkie said:

Outbound do-follow links gives the giving site a bit of trust, regardless if it's an affiliate link or not, an outbound link is an outbound link.

So, if we go by the theory above, you had alot or quite a few outbound links (affiliate links, doesn't matter what link it is, what matters was they were outbound (going away from your site) and they were do follow) that were pointing outwards from your site, thereby diluting your potential juice but increasing the sites trust, when you no-follow the links, the site loses its credibility and loses its trust gained from giving out a do-follow link therefore depending on the authority of your site, it could suffer from minor decreases in the SERPs, if you don't want to reverse the changes, then don't but instead, go through your articles and add some do follow links to authority sites such as wikipedia or some fellow sites in your niche, that should help build your sites trust up again, it will not happen instantly, it'll take a couple of month to recover.

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this is actually a very interesting and good theory because now that I think about my site I've actually completely forgotten to add any outbound links on the homepage I have three to large sites such as eBay Wikipedia and another in my niche by on all of my articles and pages which include about its 200 articles now I don't have more than five do follow outbound links in total I think. I'm not sure if this is going to help but I'll try and go through my articles and add about one outbound link to each page, I'll try to added at the bottom of each article so it doesn't take away users.

Thanks for the suggestion in a week or so I will report back with what happened

Vladamir said:

this is actually a very interesting and good theory because now that I think about my site I've actually completely forgotten to add any outbound links on the homepage I have three to large sites such as eBay Wikipedia and another in my niche by on all of my articles and pages which include about its 200 articles now I don't have more than five do follow outbound links in total I think. I'm not sure if this is going to help but I'll try and go through my articles and add about one outbound link to each page, I'll try to added at the bottom of each article so it doesn't take away users.

Thanks for the suggestion in a week or so I will report back with what happened

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Did you try adding outbound links? How were the results? Just curious.

I think highly ranked backlinks and suddenly make no follow which cause the drop of rank in SERP. Coz, backlinks are the most important one for ranking a site. Incase if it is destructed, the rank may be vary to drop at high. Try to build more backlinks to enhance the rank of your site.

Neoterz said:

I think highly ranked backlinks and suddenly make no follow which cause the drop of rank in SERP. Coz, backlinks are the most important one for ranking a site. Incase if it is destructed, the rank may be vary to drop at high. Try to build more backlinks to enhance the rank of your site.

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He nofollowed outgoing links, not incoming links.

MyGirlfriendIsaPBN said:

I'm watching this topic closely as I also use the "no follow" plugin on almost all my sites and a few of them have been shitting the bed in terms of rankings. Gunna remove the plugin and test out if it will have any impact. I made a thread earlier that sort of relates to this. Does the amount of affiliate links your site impact rankings? One of my site has close to 15 affiliate links on its homepage and I'm wondering if the affiliate links have any impact on rankings.

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As long as the content is useful on the homepage and not 500 words with 15 affiliate links then ya, it's fine. Just go watch most of the competitive amazon terms and you'll see a ton of amazon links on the homepage. I prefer inner pages, but just watch the big boys and you'll see it's fine.

This could just be a knee-jerk reaction to the changes you have made to your site and Google are good at using those to expose intentions and actions of site owners. So this could actually just resolve itself in due course but I understand that you're nervous about this being just the start of the drop in traffic and rankings.

Google doesn't like a lot of things and that makes Google a bitch but hey, they have the power to reward your site with tons of traffic so we need to stroke that bitch all the same.

Affiliate links on a site aren't liked too much by Google as your site looks like just another (in their view) pointless affiliate site that would only benefit you if it ranked well in Google but, as @ComputerJunkie pointed out, an outbound link is an outbound like so G may have had a little hissy fit now that you have nofollowed them.

Personally I would add some more outbound links to other sites, non-authority sites, a couple of straight links to Amazons home page (place these out of the way on pages of your site that hardly anyone visits) as well as a couple of authority sites too. Just to mix things up a little and to cover over the obvious fact that you have chosen to change your sites current links to Amazon.

I have known for a long time that affiliate links on your site can affect your ranking with Google which is why I released the WP Link Ninja Pro plugin which automatically hides (not the same as cloaking) all of your external links from the eyes of Google. You can tell the plugin which links you want to remain visible to Google, such as authority links, so the only links that are hidden from G are the ones that make them think your site is just an affiliate site.

Shez

@Vladamir

any update on this case?

spectrejoe said:

Stick with it for 2-3 weeks if nothing changes then switch back and report results

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+1 for this. Whenever you make any change in the website, give it 2 - 3 weeks at least before taking any decision. Google now is all about patience. In 2017 I have been ranking most of my keywords with Waiting !!!!

darulez said:

@Vladamir

any update on this case?

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My site had too many variables to give an accurate assessment of what caused the drop but it did bounce back after the change, since I kept adding pbns and other linking tactics eventually rankings went up with all aff links nofollow. Post was from july site was getting traffic of I think 200 a day, this month traffic is at 600-1000 a day and #2 sometimes #1 for most of my targetted keywords.

I would say the switch from all ******** to all nofollow from looking at ranks before and after through those months did virtually nothing noticeable except for a small temporary drop first week