Of late Google has been penalising blogs and sites that are using affiliate links in their page. This is because affiliate links are not actually pointers to valuable content and so the search engines could be misled. So what do you do if you want to show your affiliate links on your blog but still not lose your page rank.

There are actually three answers here :

1. Using  rel=”nofollow” attribute :this attribute is used in the <a> tag. For a link not to be followed by a bot you may put

<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow” title=”TITLE”>TEXT</a>

2. Creating a file that redirects users but is not indexed :Look at the HTML code given in the screen shot. The line just above the highlighted one is the meta tag that tells the robots not to index or follow any links in the rest of the page :

<meta name=”Robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

The highlighted line is used to redirect the user to the specified URL after 2 seconds :

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;URL=http://whatever.com” />

Ofcourse you can replace the 2 and the URL to change the time before redirection and the destination URL. You can add this meta tag in a different way to a page so as the page reloads automatically after x seconds :

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”x” />

3. Creating a rule in the robots.txt file : robots.txt is the code of conduct for robots on a site and is located at the websites root folder. So create a directory named nofollow and put all your affiliate link redirection pages (created by above method) in this directory. Assuming this directory is at web root ie. www.example.com/nofollow

Create a new line in the robots.txt file as : Disallow : /nofollow

Now the file would look something like

User-agent: *

Disallow: /nofollow

You need not use meta tags in the redirection file and restrict the file via robots.txt together. Any one will do the trick.

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