Introduction

As you develop your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, consider the following best practices regarding compliance and using affiliate links.

SEO and Compliance

Always follow Rakuten’s compliance standards. When creating a keyword list, check your advertiser partners’ policies on trademark bidding.

Affiliate Links

When they crawl your site, search engines follow all the links published on it. Affiliate links may negatively affect your rankings for the following reasons:

• They can make it seem that you only add links to your site to make a profit.
• They can cause search engine crawlers to assume that you are trying to trick their algorithm by pointing all traffic to one domain. In the case of Rakuten Advertising, this is click.linksynergy.com, as all Rakuten affiliate links point to the same top-level URL.

To avoid this, use the nofollow tag on your links to indicate to search engine crawlers not to follow your affiliate links or factor them into your site’s quality score.