Google advises it is better to nofollow links that involve money

One of the best things to have happened to the internet, especially SEO users and enthusiasts, is the presence of John Mueller from Google. He has been instrumental in clearing doubts regarding SEO to the community. We have seen that Google is often found to be silent on a lot of things regarding Google Search and other things. However, Google’s John Mueller clears some questions regarding Google Search as much as he can. In recent news, we have seen a question regarding nofollow links and affiliate links.

To add to that, John Mueller from Google answered this question as well. Here is the question:

I _think_ I know the answer to this. Should you nofollow an affiliate link to your own product? Would it be better if you didn’t use an affiliate link altogether? I feel really dumb right now

Talking about the question, the user is asking whether he should nofollow an affiliate link of his own product. If you don’t know what an affiliate link is, it is basically a link to any website that you can buy products from. However, the difference between an affiliate and a regular link is that the affiliate link has a tracking id attached.

This will let the company know that a sale has been made from your link. After that, some commission will be sent to you by the company. This means that an affiliate link involves making money. And Google’s John Mueller says that anything which involves money should be made as nofollow link.

Here is John Mueller’s answer:

Yep, nofollow is good for any link that’s there because of monetary reasons. I can’t really comment on whether affiliate programs are ok with that, and it seems kinda weird to me that you’d make more from going through intermediates, but … /shrug 🙂

This is also a way to not get penalized if you are using affiliate links inside your website for your own products. Because Google has already told us to use nofollow links to avoid getting penalized if you don’t trust the source.