Acceptable amount of affiliate links?

Hi. An associate of mine had his site submission rejected due to too many affiliate links. His site actually had good, unique information and he runs a legitimate business, not an affiliate site. He did however have a few affiliate links (apparently a few too many) and the site got rejected.

I was reading the submission guidelines and it says, "Sites consisting primarily of affiliate links...are not appropriate for inclusion in the directory. However, a site that contains affiliate links in addition to other content might be an acceptable submission to the directory...Look at the content on the site, mentally blocking out all affiliate links. If the remaining information is original and valuable informational content that contributes something unique to the category's subject, the site may be a good candidate for the ODP..."

So my question is: If a website has a few hundred words of original content as well as 10-15 other pages each with it's own unique content, and assuming all else is 'ok' for inclusion, is 1 affiliate link on the home page ok? And are Google adwords ok as well? If you remove those 2 items (which take up just a bit of space at the top of the page) there is still a lot of good, unique content.

Thanks!

Do the pull all the affiliate links off the site test. Look at the content without the links. Then add the links. Then ask yourself if you were an editor would you be able to see the content aside from the links? Remember, you have about a minute or less of the editor's time on affiliate heavy sites.
If an editor sees a bunch of links they start looking for the content. If they can find it easily and it seems valuable then OK. We look at websites all day long. We can easily identify sites that have a few affiliate links to make money and sites that have all there content based on driving people to those affiliates. Remember, if you take off the links where is the surfer supposed to go.

That is how I look at it. That is how I decide. Others may do it differently. I think I am kind of middle of the road though.

Good Luck and Hope this helps -

a site that contains affiliate links in addition to other content might be an acceptable submission to the directory

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And, might not.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum17/2036.htm

AFAICT, this is now being taken up in another forum because "I went to their forum but these guys out there were not really polite."

I think the response was very polite. You'll find more sympathy but not necessarily better advice at Webmasterworld.

Wow - I just cannot see how my post could be construed as rude. I absolutely had no intention of it. Oh well.

thehelper said:

Wow - I just cannot see how my post could be construed as rude. I absolutely had no intention of it. Oh well.

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You weren't rude at all. I would even say that your tone was more helpful than this type of question usually gets. I'd chalk it up to a problem in translation...

lissa said:

You weren't rude at all. I would even say that your tone was more helpful than this type of question usually gets. I'd chalk it up to a problem in translation...

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I concur. You weren't rude at all and your advice was very helpful to my question.

Thanks!

You are very welcome! Have a Great Day!

a site that contains affiliate links in addition to other content might be an acceptable submission to the directory

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cleaner said:

And, might not.

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As an example, would a site like this be ok: http://www.italycharms.com/index2.htm ?? It's got one small affiliate link (Click here if you are NOT a wholesale customer...)

I already submitted my site http://www.italycharms.com/ w/o the affiliate link, but do you think it would be ok to add one as in the example above? If you do the test mentioned earlier (ignore affiliate link and see if there's still good content) I think it would be ok. Just want to hear your thoughts though.

Why does this feel like the start of a game? "OK, if ONE is ok, can I put twenty? No? OK, how about ten?"

I'm sorry, but there really are no hard and fast rules for this - believe me, we tried to come up with some, but every time we did, we'd find stuff which clearly didn't fit.

So you are asking for information which we can't give you. Not because we don't want to, but because we don't have it. Editors work to the same guidelines that anyone can read at http://dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html#affiliate

Alucard]Editors work to the same guidelines that anyone can read at [url said:

http://dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html#affiliate[/url]

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Fair enough. It's just that I'm losing a lot of $ by not having the link up, but on the other hand I'd hate to get rejected if I do put it up and then risk losing future revenue.

According to the guidelines, "affiliate links in addition to other content might be an acceptable submission"

It's the 'might' that scares me. It just seems extremely arbitrary and if an editor who's having a bad day and looked at a million affiliate sites and rejected everything and then sees my one little link he may just go ahead and reject it anyway, even w/o looking at the rest of the sites.

I just wish it was clearer so that I would know if I'm following the rules or not.

I totally understand that you can't get into much more than this, but any further thoughts would be much appreciated. Other than that I'll drop the issue. Thanks again.

Yes, it's subjective, because the rule-of-thumb we use is: Once you blank out in your mind the affiliate links - does the rest of the site have any value to the internet user (note that this is not the webmaster). It's not just got to be unique (i.e. not copied from other sites), but it has to have value too.

You can not quantify "value".

Gotcha. Thanks again!

Since you started a thread about this elsewhere...

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4697

I've tried asking them but they refuse, in fact admit, that they can't give me a definitive answer: "That is how I look at it. Others may do it differently" or "I'm sorry, but there really are no hard and fast rules for this - so you are asking for information which we can't give you."

As you can see i've gotten nowhere with them. It seems to be very arbitrary as to how they do it.

Oh well...

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I am flabbergasted how conversations start here but end at other forums with unhappy comments like that.

How did you figure you'd get "somewhere" here? How'd you reach the conclusion that this is "very arbitrary?" You got answers that were reasoned if indefinite. That's not arbitrary. Someone could find the links to be OK, others could find them blinding and painful to look at. That's the nature of the editor-managed process.

Submit the site since you want it listed.

cleaner said:

I am flabbergasted how conversations start here but end at other forums with unhappy comments like that.

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I have received a lot of other, unrelated advice from that website and in response to another post I wanted to keep them in the loop and see what their experiences had been.

clearner said:

Someone could find the links to be OK, others could find them blinding and painful to look at.

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Perhaps arbitrary is the wrong word, but the fact that one editor may find it ok while another does not would certainly not appear to be very fair at all. I understand to an extent that that's the nature of editor-managed review, but it still seems very [substitute some word for arbitrary] to me.

But alas, I will let the issue go. I know you're doing your best to try to explain this to me and I'm just aggravated that it's been a almost a year since I first submitted. I just hate not knowing if I'm doing something wrong. It's one thing if I didn't read the guidelines and had something blatantly wrong with my site, but the fact that i've read them and complied, but can't be sure that i complied, is driving me crazy. And it's all because of 1 small, 10 word link, which really causes me to lose a lot of revenue if I don't post it. So I think you can understand my frustration.

Thanks again.

-- Josh