In John Mueller’s hangout on 09/10/2021, one webmaster asked about affiliate backlinks. Should they be using nofollow on affiliate links? If your users are the people linking to you, and they are following those guidelines, John thinks that’s fine.
You don’t want to disallow crawling of the affiliate parameters, however. Doing this will result in those pages being indexed without any content.
John recommends focusing on the normal canonicalization process.
He explains that he has seen some sites set up an entirely separate affiliate domain, which is blocked from crawling and indexing. He has also seen the variation where one is blocked from crawling and is then redirected to the website.
He believes that for very large-scale affiliate websites, this could make sense. It is, however, probably overkill for the average site.
This discussion occurs at approximately 26:17 in the video:
John Mueller 09/10/2021 Hangout Transcript:
Okay, um, let me run through some of the submitted questions, and then I’ll get back to more of you here as well. Lots of people raising your hands. So good. And I’ll probably have more time afterwards as well, to keep going, we’ll see how far we can make it.
Let’s see, the first question I have on the submitted list is what’s the best practice when dealing with affiliate backlinks? We’ve sent the guidelines that the link should be nofollowed and sponsored, but not all sites respect them? Or even have knowledge? Would disallowing Googlebot from crawling those affiliate parameters help or hurt in any way? Do we need to disavow those links?
So yeah, I think it sounds like your website, where other people link to, as affiliates. And from our point of view, we kind of understand that you can’t get everyone to do the right thing with regards to affiliate links. But we really want to make sure that at least the things that you’re publishing, or you’re saying on your side matches what our guidelines are saying. So it sounds like you’ve sent the guidelines that people should be using nofollow. And maybe I don’t know, part of your users are the people linking to you are following those guidelines. And from my point of view, I think that’s fine. With regards to disallowing crawling of the affiliate parameters, I think that’s a bad idea because that will result in those pages being indexed without any content.
What you could do? I don’t know, I think, I think the best approach is almost really just to focus on normal canonicalization for something like that. But that wouldn’t affect how kind of the value of those links is being passed on.
What I’ve seen some sites do is set up almost like an affiliate domain that is separate, that is blocked from crawling and indexing or just blocked from crawling and then redirects to your actual website. I think for really large-scale affiliate sites that can make sense, but for the average website, that’s probably overkill and not something to worry about.
Regarding disavowing these links, usually, that’s really kind of hard to do. If it’s just like, I don’t know, 10, 20, 30 percent of the people linking to you are not following your, I don’t know, recommendations. Keeping track of that, I think, is almost too much work. So in short, I think if you’re giving the right recommendations, if a significant part of your users are following those recommendations, and I think you should be fine, I don’t think you need to do anything special past that.