Google Treats Affiliate Links As Nofollow, rel=sponsored

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Google Generally Treats Affiliate Links As Nofollowed Links
by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable
Sept 16, 2020

Most of you know by now that Google generally treats affiliate links as nofollowed links. That means that most affiliate links do not pass any link signals. This isn't news really, I mean, Google has been doing this since the super early days of its link spam prevention methods.

That is not to say that affiliate links are spam but Google does not want affiliate links to count as a vote of confidence in their PageRank model. In fact, Google earlier this year, in 2020, said to use the rel=sponsored on affiliate links. In my recent vlog with Kevin Lee, 8 minutes in, we discussed how the old affiliate networks were targeted by Google to not pass PageRank and link signals. ....

Google said numerous times it ignores affiliate links, even from Amazon. That affiliate links should be nofollowed and that they would ignore them. So I don't think affiliate links would hurt you in 2020 but I doubt they would help you in terms of ranking in Google.

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