According to Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller, using affiliate links without the recommended markup will not result in a manual penalty.
This was stated during the December 10 Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.
A question is submitted in which it is asked if a website will be penalized for failing to mark affiliate links with the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes.
In a nutshell, Mueller says, “Probably not.”
Continue reading the section below for his complete response.
John Mueller of Google Discusses Manual Penalties For Affiliate Links
To be sure, using the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes on affiliate links is a strongly recommended best practice.
However, there’s no need to worry if you have affiliate links on your site that don’t use the recommended markup.
Mueller states:
“So, from our point of view, affiliate links fall into that category of something financial attached to the links, so we really strongly recommend to use this setup.
But, for the most part, if it doesn’t come across as you selling links, then it’s not going to be the case that we would manually penalize a website for having affiliate links and not marking them up.”
If that sounds confusing, the key takeaway is that when publishing affiliate links, you should use either the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes.
Google recommends it, so you won’t go wrong if you take their advice.
Mueller is implying that Google will not go so far as to levy a manual penalty if this best practice is not followed.
In his next statement, Mueller confirms this:
“But it is a best practice and I strongly recommend doing that, but it’s not something where I’d say we will go off and manually take action on these sites.”
This is generally consistent with Google’s previous recommendations for affiliate links.
When a link is associated with financial compensation, whether it’s linking to an advertiser or linking to a product from which you earn a commission, the link should be declared with an attribute.
In these cases, Google recommends using the sponsored attribute, but the nofollow attribute is also acceptable.
What Is the Importance of Using These Attributes?
By tagging affiliate links, you prevent your site from passing link equity to the other site.
This is an important SEO best practice because you should never pass link equity to sites that pay you to link to them.
If you’re linking to a page because you believe it will be useful to your visitors and you’re not getting anything in return, you don’t need to declare it with markup.
As long as you’re making a genuine recommendation, you can even link to products and services without using an attribute.
However, selling links, regardless of the attributes attached to them, is never acceptable.
To hear Mueller’s full response, see the video below:
Learn more from SEO and read Are H1 Tags Considered a Google Ranking Factor?
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