How To Add Affiliate Links without Getting Penalised By Google

I Know that running a personal Blog or a Site without any ads or affiliate links can be difficult, unless you are overflowing with cash.. After adding some Affiliate links on my site I noticed that my Page Rank dipped from 4 to 0 and the search engine traffic also reduced considerably.. I wanted a solution to this problem I was facing and there was no way I could run my blog forever without these links..

So I Decided to implement the following technique and believe it or not my Page Rank jumped from 0 to my current Page Rank of 6. Well this technique is here for all of you to try and experiment and see if it improves your ranking in the Search Engines..

So Here is the technique. The trick here is to simply setup a redirection mechanism and do some other stuff with the link so that it not only becomes Search Engine Friendly but also Reader Friendly… I Know that even a simple HTTP Redirection would suffice but they are bit ugly when viewed..

So if you were to use simple HTTP Redirection your link would like http://yourname.com/affiliate_name.html instead of the affiliate link that looked like this http://affiliate.com/aff-id?=1234 and stuff like that..

I don’t think they are very bad but they are at least not better than a link like this http://yourname.com/affiliate_name . See the change that missing .html makes all the difference, it makes your affiliate links look more like a part of your site than an affiliate link.

But remember using this technique can be tricky at times so make sure to double check everything before you make any changes. So if you are running Apache on your web server then here are the steps for you..

• PART – 1 (to impress your visitors)

1. Find and Open the .htaccess file from the main directory
2. Add the following code to your .htaccess right at the end of it and watch things happen as you go by..
   
   Redirect temp /affiliate_name http://affiliate.com/aff-id?=1234

   replacing affiliate_name with text of your choice and http://affiliate.com/aff-id?=1234 with your affiliate url. Take care that the whole statement is in the same line.. Save the file and go on..

So you now have a affiliate link that looks like this http://yourname.com/affiliate_name . Test this link and see if it redirects properly. If it does then, voila you are now ready to go the next step…

Repeat as necessary and you can have many affiliate links on your site as you want without ever getting disqualified..

• PART – 2 (to pamper the search engines)

Well this an important step and rightly said because Search Engine Rank is important to every blog owner like me.. Now that you have user friendly Affiliate url’s you just need to spice it up a bit to have the search engines saluting you..

Your new affiliate link looks something like http://yourname.com/affiliate_name. Well in the language of HTML (the one that the web speaks) it looks more like Affiliate Name . Well this is the thin bones version of what you need..

You just need to spice up that code, to make it a bit more easy for the search engines. Just modify the above code to something like this Affiliate Name . Notice that extra REL=”nofollow“ ! Well this is what tells the search engines not worry about your affiliate links and just ignore them..

Just remove the stars (*) in the code.. !! (Because WordPress was causing me headaches)

So you see, this was not as difficult as you expected it to be.. So try it out on your blog today and see if it makes a difference. And if it does then remember to thank me with a tiny link or a sweet nice comment..