Affiliate Websites and the (rel=”nofollow”) Tag

Affiliate websites have always encountered some sort of problems with rankings in the search engines. The main problem they tend to encounter is the mirrored and duplicated content issue. Sites that consist primarily of affiliate links tend to offer very little or no unique content and as a result, tend to have a harder time with the search engines.

The (rel=”nofollow”) Tag

Google introduced a tag who’s purpose is to help stop spamming on blog websites. By implementing this tag on the url, this basically means that the search engine spiders will not follow the link or do not pass any link juice/PageRank. While this is great for blog site owners and the search engines, this has provided affiliate marketers with the chance to test out the new tag and possibly help improve their results in the search engines.

For the small company that only intends to be an affiliate marketer for a product or two, this could potentially give them opportunity to include some affiliate links (using the nofollow tag) and potentially not pose any problems to their site. This also potentially can lead to sites only purpose is affiliate marketing to misuse the tag, to attempt to bypass the search engine radar.

I am just stating some observations that I have on this subject, and I am not endorsing spamming techniques. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few months and the actual results. While this will help in preventing comment spam on the Blogs, it does give another avenue for affiliate marketing with the search engines.

For more information on this check out search engine watch’s article.