I have 2 Clickbank affiliate links on my blog. I decided affiliate links might be bad for my rankings and I decided to hide them by using tinyurl. I have not lost much but I see myself from fiirst place of page one to number four on the page. I just put the two tinyurl links and nofollowed them.
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Can Using Two Tinyurl Links On My Blog Be The Cause Of Some Sort Of Penalty From Google Ranking On My Blog?
Posted on November 2, 2011.
It is not because you did something wrong but your competitors have done some good things to get the ranking above you.
Why on earth do you think that affiliate links are bad? I mean yes technically if you write a nonsense type of content and hide the fact that you are an affiliate then affiliate links are a giveaway. Position yourself as a trustworthy and reliable affiliate, write great and informative content and use affiliate links as they are.
In your case I suspect something else is a problem – as mentioned before, most likely competitors are doing something that you arent. To check, do backlink research with Majestic SEO or SEO SpyGlass and find out where competitor backlinks (esp recent backlinks) come from. This should give you both keyword insights and link building ideas and may help solve your dilemma.
Regarding tinyurl and any other shortener – they are based on a 301 permanent redirect hence they pass all link juice directly to your page. No SEO disadvantages here. From a user standpoint, they are only ok on Twitter. On blogs and affiliate sites they are extremely shady (more shady than affiliate links imo) simply because the user has no idea what is behind that bit.lyBLABLABLA – could be a cool site, could be spam.