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Director of Product Marketing
Google ranks first in the United States as the most popular multi-platform web property accounting for nearly 83% of U.S. desktop search traffic—a market share of more than 61% among the leading U.S. search engine providers. With such a stronghold on unique visitors within the landscape, Google prioritizes continuous improvement of the quality of users’ search results, most recently completing an algorithm update that improves sites’ compliance with their quality guidelines and spam detection systems. More specifically, the changes deprioritize commercial links that are not correctly annotated—compliance updates that may negatively impact affiliate links.
Google’s improvement known as the “link spam update” identifies and nullifies link schemes that serve up low quality sponsored content or posts featuring generic copy and a coupon code that provide lesser value to the end user. As a result, ranking is improved for partners’ product-related searches and high-quality content in organic search results—an enhancement that paves the way for content creators to be equitably rewarded for their uniquely valuable perspective.
Good news for affiliates that rely on organic search results to amplify monetized content: there is a workaround. By including rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” in tracking links, these tag identifiers tell search engines to overlook your affiliate links and enable your content to rank organically.
Here is an example of implementing rel=”nofollow” for the Santa Cruz VS Skateboard:
<a href=”affiliate link” rel=”nofollow”>Santa Cruz VS Skateboard</a>
Affiliates leveraging rel=”nofollow” communicate to Google letting the engine know that this link is not to be eliminated from search results.
Adhere to Google’s algorithm update while ensuring the best possible outcome for your SEO ranking by:
For more information about how Partnerize enables partners to be equitably rewarded for the value they provide, connect with us at contact@partnerize.com.
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