How to add Nofollow to amazon affiliate links in WordPress

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Hi there, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn 3 ways on how to add Nofollow to amazon affiliate links and any links in general on the wordpress website.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

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What is a nofollow link?

No-follow links are basically links with an HTML tag or an attribute of rel=’’nofollow’’ beside the link which is applied to the specific link

Learn more about nofollow links in the below sections.

Why use the nofollow tag for the links aka the purpose of nofollow.

While creating content on your blog it is always recommended to link to external resources in your blog, there are many studies that concluded that websites or blogs with at least one external link in the content rank higher than websites or blogs without any external links.

There are many other benefits of having external links in your blog posts like you can link to some relevant information and be more helpful to your audience.

But the problem is when you are linking to external websites then google will pass some of your authority to the website you are linking to which is also called link juice.

If you, unfortunately, link to a website that is not helpful to the audience or you don’t completely trust the website or the content but you are involved in a paid link scheme where you get paid for linking to people’s websites then,

In this case, linking to such a website can make you look like spam and get penalized by google.

To avoid such cases like getting penalized by Google or normal drop in rankings due to linking to poor websites in general which are not helpful to the audience in any way.

Google introduced the nofollow attribute in 2005 to just fight for comment spam which is where people posting their own advertisements or their blog backlinks in the comments of forums, blogs, and online guest books for their website higher rankings in google, later this attribute is shifted to other places like affiliate links, sidebar links, and footer links.

A nofollow attribute or tag to a website external link is a way to tell google to ignore that particular link from crawling and passing the link juice or the web site’s authority and giving the SEO & rankings benefit for the website that is being linked to.

7 Important places to add nofollow tag.

 

There are few important places where it is highly recommended to use a nofollow tag for the links, they are:

  1. Affiliate or sponsored [paid] links- These are typical links you add to your website to make money like recommending products with affiliate links or linking to people’s websites for some charge.
  2. Sidebar, menu, widget, or footer links or text ads or link of your website theme should be No- followed to avoid passing link juice and stop being spammy & avoid penalty.
  3. Link exchanges- It is a kind of scenario where 2 bloggers link to each other as you link to me and I link to you or you link to me and I give you this product for free, it is kind of similar to a paid link.
  4. Links to sites that do not feel trustworthy to you or do not add any value for the user.
  5. Links that people post on the comments section of your blogs.
  6. Links that you add to forum sites.
  7. Links that you add to social bookmark sites

If you fail to Nofollow these types of links, there are high chances of you getting a penalty because there are so many links from one website pointing to these sites which appear spam or unnatural to google.

What’s the difference between nofollow and follow links?

 

The only difference between a normally follow the link and a nofollow link is passing of link juice or authority of one website to another and higher rankings & talking about traffic, 

But, Nofollow links neither help in boosting rankings in search engines nor passing the page rank or authority to the website from your website, it is like saying to search engines not to count this link.

No-follow links drive can sometimes drive more traffic than followed links and that is why you know forums are great places for traffic for bloggers though the links are No-followed they get you traffic and link diversity in backlink profile.

Dofollow or follow links are the exact opposite of this.

With that said, let’s see the ways you can add nofollow to any link mainly amazon affiliate link.

How to add nofollow to amazon affiliate links?

Here are 3 ways you can add a nofollow attribute to amazon affiliate links or external links in general.

  1. Through plugin.
  2. Through default settings.
  3. Through manually adding the tag.

Let’s learn each way you can add a nofollow tag to your amazon affiliate link or any link in general on your wordpress website in detail step by step.

Let’s first start with a way you can add a nofollow tag with a wordpress plugin.

  1. Through the help of a plugin.

Well, wordpress plugins are shortcode which gets attached with your wordpress self hosted website.

There are many wordpress plugins in fact there are thousands of wordpress plugins that can add new functionality to your wordpress website.

Without getting into details of WordPress plugins,

Here are 2 wordpress plugins I highly recommend automatically nofollow all your external links or affiliate links in specific to be followed without taking any manual effort of making each link nofollow.

The first plugins are called WPExternal links.

Search for this plugin as explained in the below image.

 

Install and activate the following highlighted plugin and go to the settings of this plugin.

 

Select the following settings in external links.

You can select whether all of your links have to be either No-followed or followed in bulk.

Although it is not highly recommended to make all of your external links to your website has to be No-followed, only nofollow the links which are affiliate one’s or paid links or sidebar links and all those I mentioned earlier.

If you don’t want to make all of your external links nofollow you can use a specific wordpress plugin called Thirsty affiliate links.

 

Install and activate.

Go to the settings and choose your affiliate links which have to be either No-follow or Do-follow.

 

Here the reason, You should be using the plugin Thirsty affiliate links is because this plugin will cloak all your affiliate links, shorten them and make them into beautiful short links.

Here is a typical affiliate link from amazon.

Amazon.com/uvsndvnaeirvh78y8u/8y15641515151ajfnasdvkands4857-5op];41o548

The thirsty affiliate link looks like this,

yourdomain.com/recommends/product name.

Look which link type looks more attractive and appealing.

The next one isn’t it.

When you add your affiliate links into this plugin, all your affiliate links will be cloaked into small links and you can add a nofollow tag in the plugin settings by default instead of making each affiliate link of your website nofollow.

  1. Through default settings.

If you have only a handful of affiliate or sponsored links to which you want to add a nofollow tag manually, you can use this method instead of installing a separate wordpress plugin.

If you are using a classic editor, here is how you can add a nofollow tag.

First, visit the link you want to add the nofollow tag.

 

Add the link in the space and click on the gear button on the highlighted square box.

 

If you are using the default Gutenberg editor of wordpress instead of the classic editor plugin on your wordpress dashboard.

Visit the link in the post you want to add the nofollow tag.

 

Click on the link and you will get the drop-down like this,

 

Click on the arrow button and you will have the option to choose whether the link you want to be either nofollow or follow.

This is how you can add a nofollow tag in both classic editor and Gutenberg editor.

  1. You can add nofollow code manually to each link of your website in the code editor.

Here I have explained how you can add rel=’’nofollow’’ tag to your amazon affiliate links in your wordpress website in the code editor of both classic editor and Gutenberg editor.

First, let’s see how to add rel=”nofollow” tag in the classic editor in code,

Click on the text in the upright corner where I have shown it with an arrow.

 

There you will see the coded version of the text and the amazon affiliate link that you attached to the text.

After the completion of the amazon affiliate link,

You can add the rel=”nofollow” tag at the side of the affiliate link and save the changes and click back to the visual to see the normal text and you have added the nofollow tag to your affiliate link in the classic editor.

Let’s see how to add the same tag in Gutenberg editor,

First, visit the particular block where you want to add the nofollow tag,

Click on the block and that 3 dot button, follow as shown in the image below.

 

Now that you have clicked on the edit the block with the HTML button, you should see the block in the HTML version.

 

After at the end of the affiliate link as highlighted in the image, add the tag called,

rel=”nofollow” Tag at the end of the affiliate link as shown in the image above.

Save the changes and click on the block and edit visually and get back to normal block editor and save the changes as shown in the image below and you have added nofollow to your affiliate link with code.

 

Now let’s see how you can add a nofollow tag to multiple affiliate links in code in the Gutenberg editor.

First, click on the 3 dot button as highlighted in the image below and click on the code editor in gutenberg.

 

You will see this code editor,

 

At the end of each affiliate link, you can add a rel=”nofollow” tag to the affiliate link and save the changes as shown in the image above,

Now you can reverse back, click on the same 3 dots button and click on the visual editor, and come back to your Gutenberg visual editor.

These are the ways you can add a nofollow tag to your amazon affiliate links or any external links in general in your wordpress website or blog easily.

Always remember that you should make your money links like paid links or affiliate links or any links that you give to others for some exchange of something in return as a profit must be No-followed, to avoid passing the page rank and link authority if not you might end up with a google penalty.

Read the Above passage where I have explained all the places where you should add a nofollow tag other than affiliate links or paid ones to the links.

With that said, let’s conclude the blog.

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered all the queries related to how to add a nofollow tag to amazon affiliate links and any external links in your wordpress website.

Do let me know which method you are going to choose to add the nofollow tag to your affiliate links in your wordpress website in the comments section below.

Read my other blogs,

Share the blog with your friends if you found this blog to be helpful and let them know how they can add a nofollow tag on their wordpress website if they don’t know.

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I will catch you next time, till then.

Make sure that you,

Keep learning and keep growing.