Google Says No Penalty For Using Affiliate Links Without Markup - Search Engine Journal

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Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller says websites will not receive a manual penalty for using affiliate links without the recommended markup.

This is stated during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on December 10.

A question is submitted asking if a website will be penalized for not marking up affiliate links with the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes.

In short, Mueller says: “Probably not.”

For his full answer continue reading the section below.

Google’s John Mueller On Manual Penalties For Affiliate Links

To be sure, it’s a strongly recommended best practice to use either the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes on affiliate links.

However,there’s no reason to lose sleep if there are affiliate links on your site without 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 here is that you should use either the...



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