Introduction

When you post a link to another website, a connection is created between your page and the linked site. When search engines crawl your site, they will follow all the links. One of the signals that search engines use to determine the popularity of a web page is by counting the number of quality incoming links pointing to the page.

Usually, linking to another site is not seen as a problem, as search engines will assume you are sharing something you like or linking to a site relevant to your content. The problem may surface when it looks like you only add links to your site to make money, such as with affiliate links.

Functionality

The "nofollow" tag indicates to search engine crawlers not to follow a specific link or that the link to the referenced page was included primarily because of a commercial relationship between people affiliated with the two pages, which is essentially all affiliate links. This behavior can be positive for SEO, as links not tagged with “nofollow” could negatively impact search engine rankings.

Benefits

Because all affiliate links point to the same top-level URL, click.linksynergy.com in the Rakuten Advertising case, search engine crawlers could assume you are trying to trick their algorithm by pointing all traffic to that domain. Because a site’s search rank is partly based on the sites that link to it, search engines do not want paid links to affect ranking. This could negatively impact your page rank in search engines.

Adding the rel="nofollow" tag to your affiliate links is an easy way to avoid potentially having your SEO efforts penalized. You can automatically or manually add the "nofollow" tag to your links.

Automatically Adding "nofollow"

You can automatically add the “nofollow” tag to all the text, banner, and product link codes in the dashboard.

To turn this feature on, simply go to Account, click on the Channels tab, and from there click on the channel name. This will take you to the channel’s settings page; scroll down to the Preferences section.

To automatically add the “nofollow” tag to all text, banner, and product link codes generated in the dashboard, click the slider to the right. After changing this setting, any text, banner, or product link codes you copy from the dashboard will have the “nofollow” tag added like this:

Manually Adding the “nofollow” Tag

If you want to update your existing affiliate links, you can manually add the “nofollow” tag to a hyperlink’s code by placing rel="nofollow" into the code after the click URL.

Example

 <a href=https://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=lMh2Xiq9xN0&offerid=402236.10000299&type=3&subid=0 rel="nofollow"> test</a><img border="0" width="1" alt="" height="1" src="https://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=lMh2Xiq9xN0&bids=402236.10000299&type=3&subid=0">