Affiliate linking for blogs and rel="nofollow"

Often question raised  by fellow marketers  or then rookies on the internet blogging scene or E-marketing scene is “how to deal with affiliate links”.

There  can be hundreds of different solutions  out there but if you stick to the basics it should be fine. e-marketing and affiliate marketing is a legit business and its not going to go away  and so  being able to link and promote products  are also legit  as long as you do it the right way.

Not pretty but affiliate linking the right way

Apart from using different software  to make you affiliate urls more friendly , like using plugins like pretty links , url shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl ,Seo ultimate , WP Seo by yoast, etc and there is a good comparison of  plugins over here

But if you dont want to get overwhelmed by all that data and information , you can just simply work with your given affiliate url  and add the rel=”nofollow” code to your url like below so that google doesn't follow that link  and you still get your commission from referring customers who click on that link and eg below

so if your affiliate url is : http://www.elegantthemes.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=14427

You would insert the link this way into your blog

<a href="http://www.elegantthemes.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=14427" rel="nofollow">Check out amazing elegant themes here</a>

WordPress.org ( not self hosted wordpress.copm blogs) recently decided that they don't like link cloaking, and all plugins supporting it got removed from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Generally this has led plugin authors to remove the cloaking functionality so their plugin could be relisted, meaning cloaking is now available only in the commercial Pro editions.

NEW Pretty  Micro format linking

With the onslaught of new social e- marketing and  social  websites like Google + and Facebook and twitter , it would als help to keep you micro format linking good to availa of the most benefits from your social profiles  and so  the below linking profiles ( or code) would help

If you host user profiles on your website or blog and allow users to link to other profiles on the web, then you should mark those links with the rel="me" micro format so that they can be made available through the Social Graph

For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me">My blog</a> or better yet use the one below if you dont trust the links used by your writers or bloggers or other hosts <a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me nofollow">My blog</a>

The second link above gives the user and the blgo the social juice , but does not pass the rank so to speak.

Related Links

Use The Pretty Link Plugin To Track Your Affiliate Click