Affiliates Fat and thin ones
A few years ago Affiliate program and websites monetised by Affiliate income were very popular. The model was simple; your visitor clicked a link on your website which contained a tracking or affiliate code. The visitor was taken to a third party site and if that led to a sale you were rewarded financially.
That was then! Back in the good old days, Google found / felt that this niche was being abused and introduced an algorithm change to push down or exclude what it felt was the lower quality sites, the distinction it drew was if the site was solely for the purpose of the affiliate income rather than being a real site that "incidentally” was monetized this way.
Affiliates became categorised as either Thin Affiliates i.e. sites made for no other reason that to promote the affiliate link and Thick affiliates those being informational rich sites which had an only secondary objective of earning money through this sort of activity.
It was certainly a controversial move as at the time a lot of sites were doing very nicely from this type of approach.
Well our advice is simply there is nothing wrong in being an affiliate but you need to consider the impact it will have on your rankings.
What is your motivation? If your primary aim is to make money, then think twice.
Does the product match my pages topic / subject? If it does and the service is valuable to your customers then it should be OK, provided its only incidental to the pages main purpose.
There is good money still to be made from affiliates but if your primary traffic source is Google then you need to ensure that you implement the affiliate in the way described above.
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