Affiliate disclaimer - Be mindful of device reader is using

byisim

119 followers

4 years ago

I was reading Erica's (Ericabried) very useful post regarding inserting an affiliate disclaimer into your web site.

Having been considering this lately, Erica made some very useful points about the disclaimer being essentially visible and obvious & not hidden out of sight (e.g. in the footer) of your web pages. She also says (which I concur with) that honesty is the best policy.

However, what needs to be considered, which I did not realise until I checked it out, is that if you place the disclaimer so that it meet's the criteria of not being hidden, it may well be OK on say a PC/ Laptop, but when the same page is rendered on a mobile or tablet, it may not.

Specifically here, it would seem placing the discalimer in the right hand margin is OK on PC's, but end's up being placed at the very end of the page on the mobiles I've tried - in portrait mode anyway. If you switch to landscape mode some (but not all) render it the same as it would be on a PC.

This means if you place ads within your blog text and have the disclaimer in the right hand margin (which I think IS actually best on a PC), the disclaimer would never be visible to a mobile user unless they scroll right to the bottom and they may have hit the affiliate link before they do that. This then becomes contrary to the requirtement of transparancy regarding affiliate links.

I believe on more professional websites, the way the HTML is sent to the device can be different dependent upon the device (since the browser being used indicates to the site what device the reader is using and the HTML returned is tailored accordingly). I'm not sure we can get that sophisticated except by using custom code using the standard templates we have here at WA in WordPress.

I was wondering hwhether others in the community have particular opinions or practices they use to address this?