Hi Captain,

What exactly is “No-follow your affiliate links”? Can I do that with my Amazon links for instance? Thanks for your great posts. Really worth reading.

No-Follow Links:

Adding ‘no follow’ to a link effectively tells the search engine spiders to stay away from that link and don’t give any ‘credit’ to the destination of that link. Google has announced on separate occasions that their preference is to have links that could be considered paid endorsements as no-follow. With affiliate links it is painfully obvious that the links are an endorsement of some kind because they usually go to nonsense domains with lots of consonants strung together. There’s no since in giving that domain a bunch of link juice!

This is the main reason that the links in the ‘money making’ modules (ebay, amazon, cafepress, etc) are ‘nofollow’.

Does it really make a difference?

A few months ago, I replaced the vast majority of my affiliate links on lenses to include ‘nofollow’. Since then, I’ve noticed an increase in traffic. whether this has to do with tagging the links correctly or from other factors it’s difficult to say.

I’m pretty certain that at the very least it doesn’t HURT anything.

How to add Nofollow:

regular links will look something like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

to add nofollow, simply add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ after the quotes around the URL like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com” rel=”nofollow”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

Try it out and let me know if it helps your lenses!