You might have good reason...
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I can't say for sure that having too many affiliate links on a page of your site would harm your rankings but when you combine some recent events it makes you wonder:- Squidoo is making changes specifically directed at reducing the number of Amazon affiliate links on their pages - they must be doing this as a result of the impact in Google rankings experienced in the past several months
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I've read several online reports of sites being "penalized" for having too many affiliate links
- I've read several online reports of sites improving their rankings by reducing the number of affiliate links on their pages
As an Amazon affiliate, those signs all make me pay attention. How can I protect my own sites from the same issues?
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Accidental Discovery
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While researching this subject I was simultaneously testing a plug-in for Amazon banners that came out some time ago. I don't know how I missed it or if I did read about it when it came out and simply ignored it but I just came across it a couple of weeks ago. Read More
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Have you ever been working on two separate business problems at the same time and suddenly they cross paths? That's what happened. While testing the ContextAzon plug-in for WordPress as a way to add sharp looking Amazon banners to my content, I discovered something by accident.
In the back of my mind was the issue of number of affiliate links on a page. I knew Squidoo's Amazon modules were inefficiently coded to sometimes show 3 separate affiliate links for one product and I wanted to see how this plug-in handled affiliate links so I checked out the source code for my page and saw....NO affiliate links.I double checked the banner created by the plug-in as it appeared inside the content and it does show my affiliate link - it just doesn't show in the source code which is the stuff that Google would see.
I contacted the plug-in developer and he explained that the plug-in uses javascript to deliver the affiliate links and the source code only sees the javascript, not the links. A few days later I checked a page on one of my site's that had the plug-in enabled and had been cached by Google since the plug-in was added. There's a blank space in the cache where the banner would show but no affiliate link and no ad.
So visitors see the link leads to Amazon and your affiliate tracking ID is included but Google doesn't see the affiliate links!
This plug-in is NOT new so I'm guessing that a number of you have it already but since the creator himself did not highlight this benefit in the sales page, you may not realize it has the advantage of using javascript instead of displaying affiliate links in the source code.
It also has stats tracking which I only recently discovered. A tab in your WordPress browser will show you the views and clicks of each banner which greatly assists with split testing placement of your ads without having to create a number of different tracking IDs. Here are a few other tips for those of you using this plug-in:
- You can create as many banners as you want and they can be placed at the top of your site, at the bottom of your content, inside your content or in your sidebar.
- The banners can either search the page content and pull in products based on the keywords it finds or you can specify a set of keywords for the banner but I found that if you want a single product in a single-product banner, you can just paste the product ASIN number into the keyword box and it will pull the exact product you want each time
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If you're worried that your product might not be available at some point, use the product name as the banner keyword and the plug-in will find any listing that includes that product name - great for those times that a product listing goes down but pops up under a different ASIN number
- The ads are slow to load but this was done by design. The ad is displayed AFTER the page is rendered by the browser. This is what keeps the ad image from appearing in the cache version but it also means that the ad won't display right away for your visitor so these are best used lower down in your content.
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Use a wide banner to display related accessories in the middle of a review post on a single product
- If your visitor has javascript disabled on their browser they will not see these ads so make sure to use a mix of a few text links and maybe a buy button or image link
Let me show you an example. I've put this plug-in on 3 of my sites so far but also installed it on my old demo site so I could show it to you in action.
See this post:
http://www.standmixerreviews123.com/kitchenaid-artisan-5-quart-stand-mixer-review/Scroll slowly to give that first ad time to show up - that's what I mean about the "slow to render" feature and why you want these towards the bottom of your content or in your sidebar.
If you look at the source code, I have a total of 3 Amazon affiliate links - all text links. However, if you look at the page itself, I have the 3 text links and 3 banner ads - two for the product itself and one for accessories.This is not link cloaking. Cloaking redirects a link to your affiliate link and those can easily be detected by Google as affiliate links.
The banner created by the plug-in show the Amazon product price and complies with Amazon's API TOS.
I still have and use the DealAlert plug-in but since it's not available for sale at the moment, it's not an alternative for most people. It also doesn't use javascript for the affiliate link as this plug-in does. (However, I did check in with Edwin, the creator of DealAlert and he said he's still planning on getting that plug-in up on Clickbank in the future.)
If you haven't seen the ContextAzon plug-in, you can see more demos and the instructional video here:
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