One of my friend ,who is very experienced in affiliated programs and making money through it, called me. He was a little bit scared on the phone and told me that google penalized his website for placing affiliated links on his website. I too a little bit confused that in google web-master guidelines google specifies that google know the difference between paid links and affiliated links. Usually there is no google penalty for placing affiliated links on a website as google knows it is one of the important source of income for many webmasters. So I decides to analyze his website.

He is having website which covers the topic Forex. He placed affiliated links on his website in a manner where the link looks like

http://www.domain.com/link

On his .htaccess file he performs a redirection to actual affiliate links from /link

Then according to Google guidelines (answer id 66736 ), we need to block spiders from accessing and following the affiliated link. It is written like

"Redirecting the affiliate links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"


So he blocked the /link/ from robots.txt file.

[To know how to write rules for spiders in robots.txt click on the link below.

Creat rules for spiders in robots.txt ]


According to him every thing was perfect but now he is experiencing a google penalty.

Steps to avoid google penalty for placing affiliated links

The reason for his google ban might be the affiliated link some how treated as paid link for google spiders and they though this link is for manipulate google search result. So in order to recover the penalty I told him to make every thing normal and add direct affiliate links on his website. It is better add a nofollow tag in the affiliate links so the last chance of getting google penalty is also removed. After changing the necessary changes we need to request a re-inclusion in google by submitting google re-inclusion form. The link to get your re-inclusion form is:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration



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