The use of affiliate content and links when it comes to Google ranking is always a hot topic.  In the recent Panda Algo Guide, I talked quite a bit about the role affiliate links and related content and the impact of it from Panda, including specifics that Google has previously said about affiliate content and Google search results.  But someone in yesterday’s hangout wanted to know whether the number of pages of affiliate content in relation to other non-affiliate pages hurt the quality of a site in the eyes of Google ranking it.

The question was “Can It hurt the quality of my site when let’s say 30-50% of my indexed pages are affiliate pages, that contain affiliate links?”

John Mueller answered the question during the hangout.

We’ve gone through this a few times before as well, essentially affiliate content isn’t any magical content that would automatically be dropped from our side from the search results, it’s content like everything else.  So if you have fantastic content, if you have a great website, and some of the links in there are affiliate links, then fine, that’s a part of your website and that’s how you monetize your website, that’s perfectly up to you.

On the other hand, if you’re just scraping an affiliate feed, and publishing that on your site, and also including affiliate links in there, then essentially that is auto-generated content and that’s not something that we’d find that valuable.

So it kind of depends on how you want to look at it, how you want to build your site up.  So you can definitely make a fantastic site that also is affiliate based and monetized with affiliate links, and that should rank fine.  So it’s not that they’re affiliate links in there or not, that is kind of the important part, it’s essentially how you make your site.

So again, as Google has said before, it is more to do with the quality of the content (or lack thereof) you have with those affiliate links that makes the difference on whether your affiliate site ranks well or not.