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Just for fun I googled my website and clicked on “image search.” I found thousands of pics of nude women, which have nothing to do with my product. One of my affiliates is on tumblr and blogged these pics with his affiliate URL link.
Is there a way to prevent the affiliate link from being picked up by search engines?
What you are describing is called “Click Fraud.”
Please tell us the search term you used. I’d like to study the issue.
The search term was my own domain name. So if it was ThisAmazingExample.com, I typed “ThisAmazingExample” into google and then looked at the images.
Google no longer shows nude pics in the images search function, so It’s not a HUGE issue like it was at the time. At least the nude part.
However, considering the many changes google has made in its algorithms (panda/penguin) I wanted to make sure that in the future, affiliates would not be able to damage my domain’s reputation because of low quality links being placed everywhere.
Having a few other blogs that link to my domain is no big deal and google prob doesn’t care. But if an overzealous affiliate pins his affiliate link (containing my domain name) to 1000’s of pics on tumblr, then that is a ton of very low quality links and as I understand it, google may penalize my domain.
How can the affiliate link be “non-googled”?
Non google-able?
As far as “technical” countermeasures go, there is very little you can do, because it’s the affiliate’s site that Google is scanning, not yours. That’s why, adding things like this to your robots.txt file won’t work:
Disallow: /*?ap_id=bad_boy_affiliate
Your best solution is to pursue either a “contractual” or “legal” remedy with your affiliates. That’s why terms & condition pages are so darn long!
Just to clarify… This has nothing to do with the affiliate plugin actually. Your competitor (or someone with a grudge against you) can always link to your site with whatever. They can always link to your site weather you use any plugin or not.
So this is more of a general SEO type issue/concern that you have. Here are my thoughts:
1) You generally don’t have to worry about these things. Google is super smart when it comes to this sort of stuff. They will figure it out and change whatever needs changing in their algorithm. You can’t really game the system like that.
2) Google has a tool that you can use to exclude the bad links coming to your site. Read the following article to learn more:
http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/how-to-use-disavow-links-tool-4953
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