Google says No Penalty for Affiliate Links lacking Nofollow

[harrytwatter]

Google says "no penalty for affiliate links lacking markup" ... but very specific to the question of "will Google penalize you" and we all know how they like to dance around definitions and half-truths... https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-penalty-affiliate-links/429907/

What do ya'll think, any risk here? Worth differentiating between manual penalty or algorithmic impact?

Reason I ask is I've seen a half dozen or so sites get decimated with the Dec Product Review Update and the content/technical seems on par with page #1 pieces (the bar isn't terribly high with these keywords)... one massive differentiator though is none of the affiliate links have had any nofollow/sponsored markup whatsoever (totaling hundreds of links per site). ...which is making me wonder, maybe you won't get manually penalized but you also won't rank well algorithmically for not following what seems to be like a pretty important recommendation from Google?

Curious if anyone has seen any impact from massive amounts of naked affiliate links without markup or recovered anything by adding them retroactively?

 

[Ryuzaki]

though is none of the affiliate links have had any nofollow/sponsored markup whatsoever (totaling hundreds of links per site).

This is a problem. ALL incentivized / paid links need nofollow, period. Otherwise it's against Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Can Google automatically mark those as nofollow? Probably and they likely do. Do they just ignore it? Probably not. I'm confident I've seen cases in the past of sites getting hurt by this, like you said, after hundreds and thousands of affiliate links.

 

[harrytwatter]

Thanks for moving this out, wasn't sure if it warranted it's own thread. I've pressed this project forward with that same logic, Google being VERY clear about these guidelines and just because they don't explicitly spell out a consequence doesn't mean it doesn't have one.

Fingers crossed.. some sites had hundreds some had thousands..has been a headache to clean up (text, image AND button links hurray!). Yet to see any impact/effect but it's very early.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@harrytwatter, it wouldn't be hard to have a piece of Javascript or jQuery (if you already load it) to add rel="nofollow" to any <a> tag that has Amazon or Amzn or whatever the short code one is. You could do a database search and replace too, though that's always a bit more risky. I always like things like this "hardcoded" and saved in the database.

 

[harrytwatter]

@harrytwatter, it wouldn't be hard to have a piece of Javascript or jQuery (if you already load it) to add rel="nofollow" to any <a> tag that has Amazon or Amzn or whatever the short code one is. You could do a database search and replace too, though that's always a bit more risky. I always like things like this "hardcoded" and saved in the database.

ahhh shoot.... already did the dirty in a manual fashion.. got to split the work up at least. Was a stinker because there's probably a dozen different affiliate programs per site (Amazon, Shareasale, direct partnerships etc) so I probably prematurely ruled out a programatic solution.

Work is done now. Will follow up with this thread if Google reacts in any noticeable way..