In our discussions with publishers, we are often asked if using Skimlinks will affect their SEO/PageRank.  Will their links still pass on linkjuice/PageRank or do they to use nofollow on their links?. To be clear on this, lets address this question in its two parts:

• What’s the SEO effect of having affiliate links on my site?
• Do I need to use nofollow i.e. are affiliate links treated like paid links?

SEO effect of having affiliate links on my site

Google’s webmaster guidelines are clear that having affiliate links on your site is absolutely fine, as long as your site adds value and has original content.

“If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.”

“there is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site.”

These guidelines conform exactly to Skimlinks’ publisher requirements whereby we only permit sites that are adding value to merchants we work with, and are providing original content.

Skimlinks’ mantra is to maintain the balance of the value-chain whereby publishers are adding real value, and generating incremental sales, and therefore merchants are happy to continue paying affiliate commissions.

Are affiliate links paid links?

Since Skimlinks converts relevant outbound links to merchants into affiliate links, allowing you to earn commissions from your content, and works by leaving links as direct links to merchants: are affiliate links like these treated in the same manner as paid links by Google?

Definition of paid links

The paid link debate basically says that in order to maintain a equitable and accurate system if you want to sell a link for visitors/traffic you must disclose this by using rel=”nofollow” on the link, so that the search engine rankings are not artificially inflated to the site receiving that traffic (as compared to an unpaid link, added for the relevance/value of the content being linked to, which will naturally contribute to search engine rankings).

Google’s statement is that if a publisher accepts payment from another party to put unrelated links on their site for the purpose of helping the other party artifically boost their Google PageRank (and without disclosing it with nofollow), then this will be penalised by Google. Google is working hard towards ensuring sites with quality content are given preference in search results, and paid text links seek to subvert this.

This also applies to paid posts, whereby editors/bloggers receive upfront payment for writing a blog post and linking to the site that sponsored them.

Affiliate links that pass link juice

However, what isn’t particularly clear about the above is how Google views affiliate links. Affiliate links enable a publisher to be paid, but does that make them paid text links? Some affiliate links go directly to the merchant, rather than via an affiliate network redirect (for example, Skimlinks enables this), so does that mean because it can pass ‘link juice’ to the merchant is it therefore a paid text link?

The truth is, we cannot be 100% certain. Google understandably keeps its proprietary search algorithms secret, and although they give guidance as to what is acceptable, there is still a degree of interpretation involved in whatever they state.

Why affiliate links aren’t paid text links…

1. Google now own an affiliate network, so are likely to be understanding to the ethos and goals behind this area of internet marketing.
2. Affiliate marketing’s goal is NOT to help merchants boost their page rank, but for the publisher to make money from their content. They naturally perform well when this content is quality, relevant, and unique.
3. There is no guarantee a publisher will receive any payment for adding an affiliate link, if no-one goes on to buy a product/sign up for a service that the publisher was promoting then nothing is earned.
4. The choice over what to write and who to link to is completely up to the publisher’s editors, as opposed to paid text links which are driven by 3rd parties.

…As long as you have trustworthiness, quality content and relevancy

There has been a public statement by Google’s Aaron D’Souza, Sean Suchter of Yahoo and Nathan from Microsoft confirming this.  See this SEOmoz post, which stated:

“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.”

So as long as the publisher is trustworthy and writing quality content that is relevant (and we only approve publishers that do this), by using Skimlinks’ technology that employ juice-passing affiliate links, the publisher is not penalised and the merchant derives some value from being linked to by a quality publisher.

We are pleased to have this validation, as although we felt logically that Skimlinks did not breach any Google guidelines, we could never truthfully give 100% confirmation to our clients without some public statement from the search engines.

Further reading – A great analogy of why Google doesn’t treat quality affiliate links as paid links and why they can’t officially confirm it.

In Summary

In conclusion, this is our summary of why Skimlinks is comfortably within Google’s guidelines:

1. Our publishers are editorially focused. They care about writing good content and providing good services, that have relevant, useful information to users.
2. Skimlinks is about helping publishers stay financially viable, not about helping boost other parties’ search engine ranking
3. Skimlinks enables publishers to be rewarded if their content/service leads a customer to click through on the link and buy something on a merchant site. Publishers are not paid just to put a link on their site.
4. Publishers are encouraged to provide disclosure that they might earn revenue if users end up buying something as a result of their content/service. We also encourage our publishers to retain their full editorial integrity and objectivity when writing about products/services. It may impact their short-term affiliate revenues, but long term their users will trust them more, and return more often.
5. If the content that publishers write is of good quality, and they are an authority site, then it seems fair the merchant benefits via link juice for the publisher choosing them as being relevant to their subject matter.

As always, we will continue to stay abreast of developments, and will continue to advise our publisher clients on the best strategy to continue monetising their content in an ethical and user-friendly way.