Too many Zazzle affiliate links on a blog page or website page can get your pages de-indexed!

[NigelSutherland]

I have been keeping a blog for a few years, but the posts were never regular. However, I decided to work earnestly at it in June of this year - and since then I have been creating a new post every day.

My posts would be on a variety of subjects, all chosen because I could use products from Zazzle to illustrate each subject. Using the clever Affiliate Helper Tool I would be able to paste around 40 product images with links into each article. I would normally then spread them evenly throughout the text.

Having devoted so much time on the blog I decided to look at Google Search Console to see how I was performing.

At the beginning of August I had 40 pages Not Indexed, and 30 pages that were Indexed.

To my horror, yesterday I found that I had 115 pages Not Indexed, and only 7 Indexed!

Therefore previous pages that HAD been indexed have now been removed from the indexing!

Yesterday I ran all this information through ChatGPT. I also Showed ChatGPT the HTML of several pages, asking it to evaluate and explain the problem.

It advised me that the most likely reason was that I had too many affiliate links - even though they have “No Follow” built into them.

So I have now been working hard going through each article and removing the Zazzle affiliate links. Instead, I have created another blog to run alongside, with indexing turned off from search engines, and I am using this to create Gallery pages - each devoted to a subject allied to each article in my main blog. 

I decorate the old blog pages with product images still, (but only 2 or 3). These images and their captions link to the new Gallery pages, each with rel:NoFollow instructions. (I ran this theory through ChatGPT first and  was advised that it was "a smart strategy". 

Of course it will take time for Google to reconsider the blog pages and hopefully index them again, and to help them speed things up I am creating a “Summary page” at the end of each month that contains descriptions and links to all the posts from that month. (ChatGPT easily writes the HTML for this - I simple give it the post links from a spreadsheet I compile.) Then I submit the Summary page to Google for review, knowing that it will follow all the links contained therein.

Here’s the Summary page I have done for August. It is simply text only to feed the links to Google easily. 

[calartcreations]

Hello! Well, in my experience, too many affiliate links are not good for my blog, even for my Pinterest. I always try to balance them. For example, one of my blogs got canceled because of too many affiliate links, and after thinking about it, I realized it is a way the internet is protecting people. So now I focus on serving as much as I can, and after that, I place a product offer. It would be even smarter to create an email list. Any of these strategies need to be thought of in a way that serves not only your customers but also your business goals. There are many things to say about this, but this is a general idea. Hope it helps!

[NigelSutherland]

ChatGPT did give me quite a lengthy explanation and lots of advice and summarised it In short by saying: "Google is probably putting many of your Zazzle-heavy posts into “Crawled – currently not indexed” because they look too similar to each other and too affiliate-oriented. Adding your own words and structuring posts around themes rather than pure product dumps will make a huge difference."

It's a long job but I am going through every post and re-writing them.

Apparently Google doesn't mind a few affiliate links, it almost expects them, you just shouldn't go overboard!

I have numerous posts already written and scheduled to send up to next February, so I have a lot of revisions to so!

[karab]

I have a couple of websites with a lot of affiliate links (one has gift guide articles) and the articles are pretty much all indexed. Google did their annual spam update in July, so if everything that you had was nofollow/sponsored that might be the reason why your articles weren't indexed. But you should also check in Search Console to see if the pages that aren't indexed are actually pages that need to be indexed or not. My gift guide site has 671 pages in the not indexed section and 308 in the indexed section, but most of the ones that aren't indexed don't need to be. They're things like pages with extension attached to the url so it registers as a "page" but it's not really one, if that makes sense. I wouldn't take things that Chat GPT says as 100% right, because Google doesn't tell people what they're up to most of the time, and if they do they're usually not giving us the whole story.

If you're going to de-index the articles you can put as many links in as you want to, because Google won't look at it anyway. I do that to some articles for different reasons, and I get most of my traffic from Pinterest anyway, so I hardly ever worry about Google indexing anything. Their Helpful Content Update a couple of years ago really slammed most people's smaller sites anyway, so I don't rely on Google for traffic in general.

I'm just saying to not sell yourself short, don't take all of your links out. The way that search engines are stuffing so many results with AI overviews it's unlikely that articles that are used for selling products are going to rank for many searches anyway.

[NigelSutherland]

That’s very interesting and helpful. I do want Google to be able to find my Pages because the way I am working on this website is that I have multiple subjects and I hope each subject is something that is going to be of interest to someone and that they will find it doing a search. Then when they have found the page there will be images from Zazzle of products which are related to the subject of that page if that makes sense. For instance I did a page which was an article about the history of the UK police force and in that article I used images of products that I had produced on Zazzle which were related to police - for example a gift for a policeman or a card for a policeman.