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. 

[karab]

One thing about how Google is working now is that websites that have a wide focus don't generally rank as well, Google is looking for sites that really focus on one thing. Having said that, Google isn't the only search engine, so I'm not too worried about spreading out the topics a little.

I was also thinking that if you're linking to your own products you don't need to use no-follow links and put affiliate disclosures on them. If people know that they're going to your Zazzle shop (you can just mention it with the links, like "See gifts for police officers in my Zazzle store") there are no disclosures or no-follow links required. If people have a reasonable understanding that they're going to a site that you own, they'll know that they're going to a place to buy things, and that you'll be making a profit. If you're linking to other people's products you should do affiliate disclosures and no-follow links, but if you're only sending people to your own shop you can do regular do-follow links.

As far as the indexing goes, Google uses site-wide classifiers (sometimes) that will derank or demote sites in search results. They say they don't, but it's pretty widely accepted that one department of Google doesn't really know what the other ones are doing. Anyway, I've had articles that wouldn't EVER get ranked on one of my sites, so I put them on the other one with no changes and they get ranked within ten minutes. So Google plays a lot of games, and you should try to spread out your traffic. I get the majority of my traffic from Pinterest, but I also post on Facebook, Benable, and I have YouTube channels. At this point I have about 35% of my traffic from organic search and 65% from social  media/Pinterest.

Definitely go into your search console and look at what's not indexed to see if it's something you need to be concerned about, and if it is you can always request indexing, which might or might not work. If you want I can jump on a Zoom call with you to walk through your Search console if you're not sure what you should be looking for. I'm kind of a blogging nerd so this stuff is fun for me 🙂

[NigelSutherland]

My blog posts do all have one thing in common, and that is that they reference Zazzle frequently - so there is a commonality in that regard! ChatGPT did tell be that although Google has many pages marked as Not Indexed, it doesn’t mean that they won’t be in the future. It tells me that Google is aware of them, but as yet not decided, and that that could change in the future - so that’s hopeful! 😃

[Anne]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this @NigelSutherland !
I think Pinterest is not showing images from my own website for probably the same reason.
Not sure how to win this game. Maybe I need to make pages with a selection of images from a collection and then have one single link to the entire collection. Since Zazzle seems to have no-index for collections that may be a work-around. 
Even indexed pages don't get hits from search engines, so maybe something more is going on.
And you're right about a wide focus @karab  - only very large websites can flow around that.
My (small) site is nowhere in view https://annevis.com/ so I should change something for sure, or give up entirely.