Affiliate Link Disclosure

Two disclosures, not one

"Affiliate link disclosure" quietly bundles two separate obligations that people love to confuse, and you need to satisfy both.

The first is a disclosure to your reader. When you recommend a product and earn a cut if they buy through your link, the reader deserves to know that before they click. In the US this is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission under its endorsement guides. A clear, conspicuous statement like "This post contains affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission if you buy through them" satisfies the human side.

The second is a machine disclosure to Google. Affiliate links are commercial, monetized links, and Google asks that you flag them so they are not treated as plain editorial endorsements. Since 2019 the correct attribute is rel="sponsored" (rel="nofollow" is still accepted and fine). This tells Google not to pass ranking signals through a link you are financially motivated to place. Miss this and you are technically running a link scheme in Google's eyes, which can trigger a manual action.

Why it matters

• Legal exposure. The FTC has pursued undisclosed endorsements, and its guidance is explicit that disclosures must be clear and hard to miss, not buried in a footer or hidden behind a "more" link. Other jurisdictions (the UK's ASA and CMA, the EU, Canada, Australia) have their own equivalents.
• Google link policy. Google's link spam guidance treats affiliate links as links you should qualify. Unmarked affiliate links at scale can be seen as attempts to pass PageRank for money, which is squarely against their policy.
• Reader trust. Honest disclosure, done well, actually helps. Readers who see you are upfront about commissions tend to trust the recommendation more, not less. The sites that hide it are the ones that read as sketchy.
• Platform requirements. Affiliate programs themselves (Amazon Associates most famously) require disclosure in their terms. Violate it and you can lose the account and the earnings.

rel attribute values, and when to use which

Google treats these as hints rather than strict directives, but for affiliate links they are the standard way to stay compliant. Use sponsored as your default for anything you earn a commission on.

How to detect missing disclosure

• Screaming Frog: crawl and export outlinks, then filter for your known affiliate domains and networks (amzn.to, links from ShareASale, Impact, CJ, Awin, etc.) and check the rel attribute column. Any affiliate link without sponsored or nofollow is a miss.
• Custom extraction: pull all <a> tags pointing to affiliate networks and audit their rel values in bulk.
• Manual page review: for the human disclosure, open your top affiliate posts and confirm a clear statement sits above or beside the first affiliate link, not only in a footer or a separate policy page.
• Search Console: watch Manual actions. Unnatural links flags can relate to unqualified affiliate links at scale.
• Server side render check: if links are injected by JavaScript or a plugin, confirm the rel attribute is present in the rendered HTML, not just the source.

How to fix it, step by step

1. Add a clear reader disclosure. Place a short, plain statement near the top of any post with affiliate links, before the first one. Do not hide it in a footer or make people hover to find it. The FTC's whole point is that it should be hard to miss.
2. Mark every affiliate link with rel. Add rel="sponsored" (or rel="nofollow") to each monetized link. Most affiliate plugins and link cloakers can do this automatically site wide, which is the sane way to handle it at volume.
3. Audit historical content. New posts are easy, old ones are where the gaps live. Crawl the whole site and back fill rel attributes and disclosures on legacy affiliate posts.
4. Standardize a disclosure snippet. Write one approved disclosure sentence and reuse it, so every author and template applies it consistently.
5. Keep a plain language policy page. A dedicated affiliate disclosure or disclaimer page is good supporting practice, but it does not replace the on-page, near-the-link disclosure. You need both.
6. Re-crawl to confirm. After the fix, re-run Screaming Frog and confirm zero affiliate outlinks without a rel value.

What good looks like

A reader opens your review, sees a one line disclosure right below the intro that plainly says you earn a commission on the links, and reads on with that context. Every product link in the piece carries rel="sponsored" in the rendered HTML. A crawl of your whole site returns zero affiliate outlinks missing a rel value, and your Manual actions report in Search Console is clean. You are compliant with the FTC, honest with your audience, and squared away with Google, all from a change that takes an afternoon to roll out.

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