Practice · Knowledge
How do I mark affiliate links correctly?
An affiliate link is a compensated link – the commission is the compensation. The search-engine rule therefore applies in full: rel=“sponsored” (preferred) or nofollow on every single one.
The good news for Joomla sites: affiliate links are the most automatable case of all, because they run through recognizable network domains – one blacklist entry covers thousands of links.
The duty, the legal twin – and the set-and-forget setup
The duty side is settled: search engines classify affiliate links as commercial, expect sponsored/nofollow, and treat large unmarked affiliate footprints as link-scheme territory – for content-heavy affiliate sites the marking is existential hygiene, not pedantry. Alongside runs the legal twin: in German-speaking countries, commercial links inside editorial content touch labelling obligations (Werbekennzeichnung) whose details belong to your legal advisor – the SEO attribute and the visible “Anzeige/Werbung” label solve different problems, and a clean site carries both. Now the systematic part, and it is genuinely pleasant: affiliate links rarely point at the merchant directly – they run through the networks' tracking domains (the Awins and Belboons of the world, Amazon's tag parameters aside) or through your own redirect path like /go/ or /empfiehlt/. That makes the blacklist the perfect instrument: enter the handful of network domains once, and every affiliate link on the site – past, present and the one an author adds next year – carries nofollow automatically; in our JNofollow plugin the blacklist deliberately overrides every bypass, so not even a stray follow class can leak a commercial vote (labelled in-house recommendation). Sites using their own redirect directory add one more layer by disallowing that path in robots.txt. The residual manual case: direct merchant links with tag parameters – for those, an editorial convention (sponsored set in the editor, or a dedicated class the tool recognizes) closes the gap. End state worth aiming for: an affiliate setup where correctness does not depend on anyone remembering anything.
Key facts
- Commission = compensation: affiliate links fall under the sponsored/nofollow duty in full.
- Legal twin (DACH): visible ad labelling is a separate obligation – attribute and label solve different problems.
- Systematic lever: network tracking domains on the blacklist – thousands of links covered at once.
- Blacklist beats bypass by design – no stray follow class can leak a commercial vote.
- Own /go/ redirects: additionally disallow the path in robots.txt.