How Many Affiliate Links Can I Have - Blogger
How many affiliate links can you have per page? How many are too many depends on the number of words in your posts. 3 affiliate links in a 500 word post is not a lot, but 3 in a very short post may not do as well. In general, Google seems to favor longer posts these days. Check out the pages showing up on the first page in Google for the keywords you are targeting to get an idea about the number of words on pages that are doing well in your niche (and their affiliate link density). One way to out-compete them would be to add even more words and helpful advice to your posts (and potentially more affiliate links as your page gets longer).
The rest of this post is in answer to a specific question from another Wealthy Affiliate member that went something like this:
"So far I have 3 posts with about 3 product links in each. However because they are all posts they all show up on my blog roll on my main page [resulting in lots of affiliate links on the homepage.]"
To answer your specific question, I think the default wordpress setup you are using, combined with your shorter post lengths, will result in a lot of affiliate links on your homepage compared to the number of surrounding words (10 posts with 3 affiliate links per post would end up with 30 affiliate links on your homepage). I would personally be a bit uncomfortable with that, especially for your homepage. Here are some things you can consider doing:
1. Create a new Wordpress Page (not a post) that you will use for your homepage (I will tell you how in a minute). It can welcome your readers, discuss your philosophy for the site, and link to some of your favorite posts (the number of internal links within your own site is not a concern). A link to your about page is also a good idea from here, you want people to get to know, like and trust you, so getting them to read your story is a good start. What is on that page will evolve over time. For now try and optimize it for your most desirable keyword you want your site to be known for (nothing too competitive).
2. Create another Page with a title like Blog, it doesn't need to have any content (it will end up looking similar to how your homepage looks now). This will become your new Blog Summary page with links to all your blog posts (instead of having all that on your homepage)
3. In your wordpress dashboard go to Settings > Reading. At the top of that page change your "Front Page Displays" setting to "A static page (select below)". For the Front Page setting select from the dropdown the new hompage you created in point #1 above. For the Posts page select the Blog page you created in # 2 above.
4. Add a link in your main menu to the new Blog page (helps to get your new blog posts indexed etc). You can also add a Start Here link that points to your homepage (most people entering your site will not enter from your homepage, so this is a way to encourage them to read your story)
This approach allows you to control the message and number and types of links on your homepage, and makes your site look more like a website with a blog rather than just a blog.
So now you still have your original problem, but on the Blog summary page (which is better than on the homepage but not ideal).
You can fix this with the More button in your posts. This sets how much of your post shows up in the summary of your post on the Blog summary page. If you position the more tag above the affiliate links in your post then those links will only show up on the posts and not on the Blog summary page. You can even set this at the very top of your posts then only the post title links show up on the blog page. You can access the More button from the text view in your posts, or just paste in the tag <!--more--> at the point where you want your post summary to end. You can also do it from the Visual tab in your posts, there it is the "Insert Read More tag" icon. My advice is to use this to minimize duplicate content and excessive affiliate links on the blog summary page. In general you want google to index your posts, not your blog summary page. Making sure your content only exists on your posts page ensures google doesn't get confused by duplicate content.
One more thing I would recommend is to add nofollow to your affiliate links. Find your affiliate links in the Text tab of your posts and add the following:
<a href="your affiliate link" rel="nofollow">anchor text</a>
This tells google not to follow the link, which is said to protect you somewhat from any negative penalty for affiliate links on your page. It doesn't hurt and may help. Don't use nofollow on any of your internal links (except perhaps pages like your privacy policy) because you want google to follow and index those.
Hope that helps you and other bloggers understand how many affiliate links you can have on a page, and how to have more control over it in Wordpress.
Brad ( https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/purrpower )
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This is what I have been looking for, "how too".
Brilliant Brad thanks