Affiliate links and rel="sponsored"

[M4DM4X]

Seen this post on reddit what do you think/use ?

You need to add a rel="sponsored" to the html of your affiliate links. Especially if you have a lot of them.

I forgot one time after adding tons of affiliate links and traffic dropped like a stone. However, once I added the rel="sponsored" to them, traffic quickly rebounded. Lesson learned.

If you need to know how to do it, just Google it.

 

[Steptoe]

Just an anecdote IMO without any further data given. It's best to cloak your aff links anyway, especially on parasites.

 

[M4DM4X]

Just an anecdote IMO without any further data given. It's best to cloak your aff links anyway, especially on parasites.

I'm cloaking them, I mean it's a link to another one of my sites that redirects to the offer to change the referer. But I think google can follow the redirect so they know it's an affiliate link. So better put the rel tag I guess. It shouldn't hurt rankings. Or maybe it should lol google is evil.

 

[M4DM4X]

I agree with you. Ts is nonsense) links should always be hidden from bots

When you say hidden you mean linking to another domain that automatically redirects to the aff link, right ? Or using a paid cloaking service like for google ads ?
Im using the former.

 

[M4DM4X]

When you say hidden you mean linking to another domain that automatically redirects to the aff link, right ? Or using a paid cloaking service like for google ads ?
Im using the former.

Ok I browsed the forum to see how you guys are cloaking links. Some say to just shorten the link with a free service or a subdomain, some say to use a paid service to filter google IPs.

Well I think the latter is useless for this case, we're not trying to circumvent ads antispam here, tons of legit blogs are using long ugly affiliate links as is while not even shortening them, and they are ranking well.

I'll just stick to my method, I'm using Brad's redirector (the php script can be found here), it fakes the referer for the affiliate network so they see a legit one, while redirecting to the offer. I'll add the rel tag though, following the redditor's advice

 

[M4DM4X]

I've always treated rel="sponsored" as a good practice for affiliate links. Whether it directly affects rankings is harder to prove.

Yes, maybe the lack of it could affect rankings in a bad way