Ranked #1 With 27 Affiliate Links

bynathaniell

101K followers

4 years ago

A question that comes up a lot is "how much is too many affiliate links on a page?". People get really nervous about adding more than one or two affiliate links, and think that Google will penalize them.

In general, standard advice is to use as few affiliate links as possible. Why? Because you don't want to be overly promotional. It's poor UX for visitors, and it makes sense that Google wouldn't love it.

However, there are many situations where you can still rank really well with a high amount of affiliate links. For example, I'm currently ranked #1 for my a keyword I was aiming for, and I had a whopping total of 27 affiliate links on the page.

Why So Many Affiliate Links?

Despite the fact that this is really a niche topic, even within the homebrewing niche (most people use 5-gallon kegs, not 1-gallon kegs), there was a huge selection to choose from. In fact, this article is also a great example of how when you become an "expert" in your niche, you can really write a TON about a topic 99.9% of people in the world don't care about.

I'll tell you what though, if you want a 1-gallon keg, my article has EVERYTHING you need to know.

So there were probably about 10 or 11 items in the list. I used an affiliate link for both the picture of the item, as well as a text link. On top of that, there were some one-off accessories I thought were important.

It made sense to link to each item, and really I had no choice with the image links because I was using Amazon API to generate the images. The exact plugin I used was called Amalinks Pro, but it's a paid plugin with recurring fees, so keep that in mind if you are considering using it for your own website.

Stats, For Your Information

The post had a total of over 3000 words, so I think that was really a good amount of content to support that number of affilaite links. I also have internal links going out to other related topics, and links coming in from internal sources as well.

Here's what the structure looks like on the page.

The QSR was only 9, which was probably a huge factor in my #1 ranking for the term "Best 1 Gallon Kegs". I'm ranked on page 1, but lower down for the broader term "1 Gallon Kegs", which has more traffic.

Jaaxy was pretty much right though, and there's almost no traffic coming to the post. ALMOST. I get about 4 visits per day.

What's really interesting is that people spend a whopping 18 minutes reading the page, so I'm confident that my information is useful and interesting to that small group of people doing this search.

How Much Money Does This Keyword Make?

Unfortunately, nothing. I would think that with folks spending almost 20 minutes on the page, they'd actually buy something. With so many product options, so many links, and such high engagement, I would think that something would come through my Amazon links, but nope. Nothing.

Maybe everyone is going to buy used equipment on Craigslist after they use my website for research.

I guess this is another good point to make - more affiliate links doesn't always mean more money!

Final Thoughts

Don't take this post as me recommending that you stuff affiliate links into your content whenever possible. I'm just saying that you don't have to be "afraid" to use affiliate links when you think they are necessary.

This is just a side project for me, so for now I'm going to leave the post as is, and next time work on totally different content. If I was more focused on this site, I'd follow up with more related content and internal links.