Google’s Matt Cutts On Affiliate Links: We Handle Majority Of Them

The video about is from the SMX Advanced show in 2012 where Danny Sullivan asked Google’s Matt Cutts about nofollowing affiliate links.

Matt responded that although they handle the majority of affiliate links automatically, if you are at all worried, you should nofollow those links to be careful.

Here is what Matt said, if you can’t watch the video above:

We handle the vast majority of affiliate stuff correctly because if it is a large enough affiliate network we know about it and we handle it on our side. Even though we handle I believe the vast majority of affiliate links appropriately if you are at all worried about it, I would go ahead and just add the nofollow because you might be earning money from that.

Other Affiliate Linking Topics:

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • http://winkpress.com/ MK Safi

    No, fuck that. When I link to a product, I endorse it and will dofollow the affiliate link. If Google is too stupid to figure this out, that’s their problem. Idiots.

  • http://thinkconceive.com/ Justin

    I like your style. 

  • creditgeeks

    The definition of an affiliate is a thin line these days for example between a publisher, so not sure how google can define an affiliate, unless, any presence of an affiliate network link, is the indicator they use.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1534746564 Ten Sets

    Google – please don’t be afraid of us, endorse us, were human beings too!

  • Pat Grady

    In many cases (and growing), Affiliate links being present is primarily “tracking” and much less “endorsing”.  To continue treating them monolithically is a naive, simplistic view of the Internet.

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