Affiliate Links in Food Blog Posts
What are the best practices for adding affiliate links to your food blog? One of my friends on Instagram asked this the other day, so I wrote a newsletter about it. Of course, I wanted to share it with you as well! So, here are my top tips on how to use affiliate links in food blog posts!
Please keep in mind that I am not a legal expert and none of this should be taken as legal advice. Thank you!
What are affiliate links?
Affiliate links are unique URLs that you can use to promote products & services to your audience. If someone purchases the thing using your affiliate link, you receive some sort of commission.
Affiliate Link Best Practices
1) Tag them as “nofollow”
In your blog post, it’s important to mark affiliate links as “nofollow”. Search engines will ignore nofollow links.
To mark links as nofollow, click on the link while editing your blog post and check the box “Search engines should ignore this link (mark as nofollow)” under “Advanced”.
Don’t forget to hit “Save”!
If you’re using WPRM and adding affiliate links to your recipe card, you can mark them as nofollow under “Equipment Affiliate Fields” (for equipment) and “Ingredient Links” (for ingredients).
I haven’t used any plugins for affiliate links (honestly not sure why 😅), but Tasty Links and Easy Affiliate Links were recommended by fellow food bloggers if you want to look into those!
2) Have them open in a new tab
For accessibility purposes, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) recommends that links such as affiliates should open in new tabs.
You might’ve noticed this setting in the photo from the first tip 😉
Setting a link to open in a new tab is in the same location as marking links as nofollow.
Click on the link, check the box “Open in new tab”, and hit “Save”!
WCAG also recommends making it clear to the user that the link will open in a new tab. I am not on top of this, but some plugins can add accessibility icons next to your links if you want to be super compliant (I think External Links does this).
3) Let your audience know they’re affiliate links
According to the FTC’s guidelines about affiliate link disclosure, “…the guiding principle is that it has to be clear and conspicuous. The closer the disclosure is to your recommendation, the better.”
The best practice would be to have a disclosure right next to the link.
However, I just have a blanket statement in my post info saying “This post may contain affiliate links” at the top of each post. If you have Feast (affiliate), you can edit the post info in the plugin settings.
If you’re an Amazon affiliate, you’ll also want to make sure you’re following Amazon’s guidelines.
I have their statement, “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” in my footer.
4) Don’t be spammy
When you’re adding affiliate links to blog posts, make sure they’re actually helpful to the user and make sense there. Don’t go adding a ton of affiliate links just to try to make an extra $0.23.
I’ve seen rumors that using affiliate links and/or having affiliate disclosures hurt blogs in the Google updates. I personally haven’t found any evidence validating this. Myself and many others who were not impacted by the Google updates use affiliate links properly.
You can read Google’s link spam guidelines if you’d like!
In general though, if you’re worried about affiliate links affecting your standing with Google or your audience, just don’t use them 🤷♀️
