FAQs About Technical Topics

Here’s a collection of questions and answers about more technical things such as HTML and SEO.

Will Google harm my site for using affiliate links?
It heavily depends on how many affiliate links you place and what other content you have.

If your website is thin on original content and has lots of outbound affiliate links then it’s highly probable Google and other search engines will frown upon that and rank your website in low positions as a result.

Your website should naturally contain a mixture of regular editorial links and affiliate links.

To be safe it can be good practice to use the rel attribute and give your outbound affiliate links either the ‘nofollow’ or ‘sponsored’ tag.

Remember to always focus on the user experience ultimately first. The aim is to provide useful content for people that helps their buying decisions.

There’s many different factors search engines use when deciding where to rank your website, so remember they play a huge part too, but a good start is to have healthy practices when it comes to your affiliate links.

Do I need to know coding or programming languages like HTML and CSS?
Not necessarily, it depends on how you plan to link out to merchants. If you own your own website, or want to own a website, then to be able to get it to function and look exactly how you want it to, then you may need to learn some programming, even if it’s only basic entry-level stuff. But many affiliates, in fact, most affiliates, probably don’t have that much programming knowledge.

A far more important skill is creating quality content that allows you to use affiliate links. So if you haven’t yet mastered content creation then you may want to prioritise that.

Do I need to add ‘nofollow’ attributes to my affiliate links?
Google uses attributes to help it understand the links you place in your content. You can use the ‘nofollow’ attribute. You can also use the ‘sponsored’ attribute. The ‘sponsored’ attribute was introduced in 2019. You can read more about it in the blog post here.