[…] = document.getElementById(domid); if (handle) handle.style.display = “none”; } My recent posts on managing affiliate links and nofollow cloaking paid links led to so many reactions from my readers that I thought explaining […]

I don’t broadcast affiliate links. This is a test for some fancy things search engine crawlers should face when they try to crawl the URL. Of course it’s a good idea to book early, so the link isn’t completely worthless.

ps. arrr!

Let’s say I hypothetically work as an in-house SEO for an e-commerce company. This company does a very significant amount of volume via partners and affiliates. I spent at least a year and a half begging, pleading, ranting about the need to strip tracking id’s out of our URLs and doing a 301 to the canonical version, but my puppet masters always come back with “but some people don’t accept cookies and we have to make sure the sale gets credited.”

So the fact that we put a ton of work into creating this brilliantly SEO’d site and our affiliates are ranking on Page 1 for competitive keyword terms with OUR page, while the non-affiliate version of the page is in Supplemental Hell, doesn’t bother you?

“Your problem, not ours”

Btw: we pay our affiliates up to $100 per sale. You’d think this would make it someone’s problem besides just mine.

So, if you’re an affiliate of my company’s and you suspect we’ve been trying to screw you out of commissions… rest assured, to my big distress and against my SEO-biased advice, we’ve never ever done this. Hope you’re happy puny little affiliates because you made my life hell. Hypothetically.

But of course, at some point during the summer, as if by magic, Google seemed to have figured it out and the free ride was over.