In an episode of AskGooglebot, an SEO Professional asked John Mueller whether or not it was a good idea to hide affiliate links.
John explained that affiliate links are just fine and you can absolutely use them to help monetize a website.
You want to make sure that you mark affiliate links by using the new nofollow rules: mark them as rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow.
You don’t have to hide them with JavaScript or otherwise cloak them from being viewed on your site.
He also recommends to double-check the Google search documentation for any items you might have missed.
Additionally, hidden text and links can be a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
Today, Emmanuel (@aristeidopoulos) is asking whether it makes sense to hide affiliate links. To explain briefly, affiliate links are links to other businesses. The person placing the link will get paid when users go to that business and buy a product or a service. Affiliate links are fine, it’s fine to use these to help monetize a website.
There are two important aspects to keep in mind though. First, your website should provide unique content and value of its own. It can be tempting to just republish a generic or low quality description, but users expect to find something useful on your website too. Second, affiliate links, as with other paid links, should be declared.
They should be declared both for users as well as for search engines. For users, it’s worth checking with local regulations regarding what you’d need to do. For search engines, you should use the rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored link attributes to express that this is a paid link.
It’s not necessary to hide or obfuscate affiliate links for search engines. There’s no need to use any weird automatic JavaScript, onClick handling, or cloaking. To hide these, just link and declare them so that the links can be treated appropriately.
If you use JavaScript to add affiliate links, remember to add the appropriate attributes there too. On this subject, often affiliate links are used within the context of product reviews. If that’s the case for you, double check our search documentation to see if any kinds of structured data might be appropriate to implement on your pages.
And that’s it for this time. I hope you found this useful and insightful. See you in one of the next episodes of #AskGooglebot and don’t forget to subscribe to see them all.
