Should Affiliate Links Be Nofollow

Should affiliate links be nofollow? Here are some reasons why you should nofollow it, and this article will explain why setting it up wrong can hurt your website's performance as well as some technical challenges beyond just the concept of link juice.

What's The Difference Between A Do follow Link and No follow Link

Affiliate links are definitely important for your business, but search engines don't like it when your website is loaded with too many of them.

dofollow links

When you add a link to your WordPress site, it automatically becomes a "dofollow" link. This means that the linked site will receive some of your site's link juice. But if you have too many links pointing to affiliate sites, search engines might penalize you for it.

So in many ways, dofollow affiliate links can waste search engine's crawl budget if they are not managed properly.

Learn more about dofollow vs nofollow

If you want to make sure that search engine bots don't waste their time crawling through your affiliate links, the easiest way is to add a nofollow tag to the link like this:

nofollow links

When you add this to your affiliate links, the bots will know not to follow the link or pass on any of your site's link juice. It's like putting up a "do not disturb" sign for search engines.

This way, you can focus your crawl budget on the important pages of your website and help to boost your search engine ranking.

What Are No Follow Affiliate Links?

Affiliate links are definitely important for your business, but search engines don't like it when your website is loaded with too many of them.

However, don't give up on affiliate marketing just yet! It's not as straightforward as it seems.

How To Cloak Nofollow Affiliate Links

Cloaking nofollow affiliate links are easy with a link shortener. The process is easy and quick for affilaite link URL that the user may not be easily adding the nofollow tag.

If you're using Pretty Links, all you have to do is go to the WordPress dashboard, and select Add Link

  1. Select "Cloaked"
  2. Enter the URL
  3. Click on advanced options
  4. Check "no follow"

(Most affiliate network link generator will provide the nofollow URL attribute option, but some don't)

Are No Follow Links Bad For SEO

While nofollow links don't directly improve your SEO, they can still bring valuable referral traffic to your website. 

For example, high traffic sites like Buzzfeed, CNN and others can pass through traffic back to your site through the nofollow link. So they can definitely add value to your website's performance even if they don't necessary a search engine ranking factor.

However, webmasters must feel confident about these links and know what they are and where they lead the visitors to. If the nofollow affiliate links lead to low quality or irrelevant pages, then these should be audited and removed.

Do Nofollow Links Count As Backlinks?

No, Nofollow links do not count as backlink. No follow doesn't pass link juice to whatever pages it links to.