Paid On Results is pleased to announce that we are the first Affiliate Network to roll out a new tool which allows Merchants to nofollow links to their site and affiliates to nofollow links from their site.  This new tool gives our Merchants and Affiliates full control as to how search engines handle links to and from their sites.

The reason why we decided to roll out this new tool is in response to a growing number of Merchants who are being convinced by some SEO companies that the reason for their drop in rankings is in part down to Affiliate links – although there being clear evidence to the contrary.  As such we thought rather than trying to counter the SEO companies’ dubious arguments it would easier to just offer a tool where the Merchant could decide whether to follow or nofollow all Affiliate links going to their site.

This simple solution means that our Merchants can confidently ignore the advice of these ill-informed SEO companies and focus their attention on building their Affiliate programme.

What is nofollow?

Nofollow is a piece of code which tells a search engine not to follow a link.  This means that the link will not pass any page rank or authority which are metrics used in calculating the ranking of a site.   Although search engines such as Google are good at detecting Affiliate links and deal with them accordingly we thought for our Merchants’ peace of mind we would adopt the “belt and braces” suggestion offered by the head of webspam team at Google, Matt Cutts to nofollow links if there were any concerns about the them.

How to nofollow a link?

For Merchants and Affiliates go to your Control Panel  and on the left hand side near the bottom of the page click on Account Options and then under the heading “No Follow Links” set the option you want and then “Update Preferences”.