Red-flag list
Affiliate link disclosure: fourteen red flags to fix first
Before you point a link at a money page, look at the page the way a reviewer, a reader and a search engine would. These are the flags we check.
Fourteen flags on the page itself
- The disclosure sits in the footer only.
- The first affiliate link appears above any disclosure.
- Wording is vague, such as "some links may help us".
- Affiliate links carry no rel=sponsored attribute.
- Product photos are the merchant's, uncredited.
- "Best" is claimed with no test described.
- Prices and dates have not been touched in a year.
- The page has no author or editorial note.
- Every product receives five stars.
- Cons are missing from every review.
- Coupon text is copied from the program's feed.
- A popup hides the content on mobile.
- The page is not linked from your own navigation.
- The same paragraph appears on several URLs.
Why disclosure comes before links
A clear disclosure is the cheapest trust signal you own. It costs one sentence. Place it above the first affiliate link, in plain words, and keep it visible on mobile.
Rules about what you must say vary by program and by country, and we are not lawyers, so read the terms of every network you join and check local advertising guidance yourself. What we can say is practical: pages that hide commercial intent tend to read badly to readers and to quality reviewers alike.
Google's reviews guidance, folded into the core system in March 2024, rewards first-hand evidence. Photos you took and notes from real use matter more than another paragraph of specs.
Three fixes that take an afternoon
Move the disclosure up
One plain sentence beneath the intro, before any product card or button.
Mark affiliate links
Add rel="sponsored" to outbound commission links, as Google's guidance from September 2019 suggests for paid relationships.
Show your testing
A short method box: what you used, for how long, what failed. Even three lines help.
A before and after wording sketch
Weak: "Some links on this page may earn us a small reward." Hidden, vague, apologetic. Readers skim past it, and a reviewer cannot tell which links it covers.
Stronger: "We earn a commission if you buy through links marked with an asterisk, at no extra cost to you. We tested every grinder here for at least four weeks." It sits under the intro, names the mechanism and ties to the testing claim.
Both lines are invented examples, so adapt them to your own programs and check each network's wording rules, since Amazon Associates, Walmart and others publish their own requirements. We do not interpret them for you.
What a reviewer sees in thirty seconds
Open your page on a phone. Scroll once. Count how many screens pass before anything proves a person used the product. Four is too many.
Quality raters follow Google's published guidelines, and automated systems approximate the same judgement, so the habits that please a careful human tend to age well across updates such as August 2022 and March 2024. Photos, dated notes, honest cons and a named testing method all help.
What this has to do with buying links
Everything. A placement points at your page, so the page is judged when attention arrives. A link to a page with a buried disclosure and copied specs earns little and exposes the whole site.
Run the teardown on any offer, run this list on your own page, and only then use the decision tree. That order saves money.
Where we land
A page you would show a stranger is a page you can link to
If more than three flags apply, fix the page first. Links amplify what is there, good or bad, and we never promise how Google will weigh a given placement.
- Disclose early.
- Show first-hand proof.
- Then spend.