Do you have to disclose an affiliate code?
-
If I put an affiliate code, which will get me commission if someone purchases after clicking my link, do I have to disclose it is an affiliate code?
-
It is required that affiliates with a site do list on the site somewhere that you may get a commission for items purchased from links on your site and that it does contain Affiliate links. If you put this in your tems of service under disclosure Should be fine. If you want to be totally honest and upfront with your Visitors you could also put a mention of it in your about me section And ensure your visitors that even though you may get a commission If someone makes a purchase from a link on your site that you would Never endorse a product unless you believed in it 100%. Or you Could only promote products and services that you actually do use Yourself. And disclose that as well. The more upfront and honest you are online the better off you will be.
-
Well this isn't a technical question now, is it?
Interesting. I am not a lawyer but it looks like it even applies to those who are not located in the U.S. but doing business with any American company.
Apparently, we are now supposed to disclose it. It doesn't say anything about disclosing a code tho. (Maybe) You could just add this to your Site Terms and inform the visitor that you have affiliate links on the site.
Edit: I just noticed that article is quite old. How did we never hear anything about this?
-
Thanks, but then what is this article discussing regarding the FTC law about affiliate codes?: http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/2009/11/30/ftc-on-guidelines-affiliate-disclosures-compliance/
-
You can use a redirect script to hide that code but when they click on the link, they will most likely see it in address bar. It still helps.
You will basically create something like domainx.com/link and it will redirect to your actual affiliate link.
Either learn how to redirect manually using .htaccess or google "redirection script".
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404 or 410 status code after deleting a real estate listing
Hi there, We manage a website which generates an overview and detailpages of listings for several real estate agents. When these listings have been sold, they are removed from the overview and pages. These listings appear as not found in the crawl error overview in Google Search Console. These pages appear as 404's, would changing this to 410's solve this problem? And if not, what fix could take care of this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartijntenCaat0 -
Disavowing 100k Affiliate Links
Hi all, hope you're all good. I am updating our disavow file, we've noticed a couple more spammy links which are pointing at or site. While I was at it, affiliate links came to my mind. At the moment we have over 100k+ affiliate links pointing to the root of our site and other categories/products, most of them are do-follow. However, taking a look at WMT, it's one of our 'Who links the most' and the affiliate network is pointing a total of 115,065 links to us. My question; bearing it mind this site generates over 2million hits a month, is it really worth disavowing the entire affiliate link network. This would result is all of those 100,000 links being disavowed over time. Do you think this would result in a positive? Let me know your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Of the two examples of markup (microdata, schema) code below, which of the two is better designed for its purpose of Q&A, and what might be suggested to improve upon these lines of code (context: questions and answers within article content.
ANSWER SEEN 'WITHIN THE QUESTION' BRACKET So you ask, why is the sky blue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RedFrog
Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results 'QUESTION' AND 'ANSWER' IN 2 SEPARATE BRACKETS Why Is The Sky Blue? Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results Thanks, Mark0 -
Organic Links and Skimlinks Affiliate Program
Hi All, If you're not familiar with Skimlinks, what they do is turn organic links into affiliates links so that publishers can earn commission through our affiliate program. Pretty much every SEO's nightmare. myfashionlife.com/archives/2013/07/16/get-anne-hathaways-paper-denim-and-cloth-look/ anchor text "Floppy straw hat" Looking at the source code the link looks clean, but as soon you click on it you get redirected via a 302 to our site. My questions is; is it just users that get redirect or is it the same for search engines? Screaming frog recognises the link as a 200. Are we losing all the link juice, or is it fine? I've have half a mind to kick them out of the program. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Site to Check Code (HTML) and (CSS)
Hi, Iwas wondering what sites you use to check if your website has clean HTML & CSS code. I know there are many for load time. I remember coming across one that checked HTML and CSS and also listed the errors. Thanks in advance for any input Jimmy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmy02250 -
Strange affiliate links in web master tools
Hi All I have been looking in the Google webmasters tools account for a client and from out of nowhere they suddenly have 42,000 links last time I checked it was just over 4,000. It looks to me like some of our affiliates have links showing, they are formatted so it goes via a php script that looks like accomtracking.php?estid=1234&ref=123 this link appears 3 times in the source code of the page that is linking to my client but Google webmaster tools thinks it is linking 12,000 times. I assume this is a problem with the database where the link points to, issuing a unique link for each visit or something similar but I am not sure how to explain it to my client and how to correct it / stop it happening again. There are around 37,000 links like this to the site from just 6 referring sites and the client have had an unnatural link warning so I am anxious to get this fixed. Any help gratefully received. Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKE0 -
Affiliate Links Added and Site Dropped in only Google
My site was dropshipping a product and we switched to an affiliate offer. We had three 4 links to different affiliate products. Our site dropped the next day. I have been number 1 for 6 months, has a pr 6 and is 2 years old. It has been 2 weeks and the site hasn't jumped back. Any suggestions on how to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkash0 -
Affiliate Site Duplicate Content Question
Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0