This morning I noticed that Microsoft’s search engine Bing! is listing affiliate links in some sitelinks (the groups of links you see under some sites in the SERP listings).

Example:

The sitelink shown in the image above for 32vegas Casino on UKGF is actually an affiliate link (301′d via a .htaccess file). The link is sitewide in one of the tabs of the sidebar on the site in question, and is actually rel=nofollow’ed. Note that the URI may appear to be internal to a “dumb” spider (the link goes to to http://example.com/32vegas.com/).

Pre-third-coffee thoughts on affiliate links in SERPs:

• The fact that Bing is giving sitelinks for something which isn’t even particularly emphasised or important is interesting, but not very encouraging in regards to spiders/search-engine technology working well to improve the user experience.
• Would Bing! have indexed the link as a sitelink if it were awash with parameters and linked out rather than seeming to be an internal link (at first glance)?
• This has got to be good for affiliates, right?
• This is bad for usability – users will click on the link and bypass the desired web-site completely, perhaps causing confusion, and debasing all the good stuff the webmaster put in, in regards content creation, editorial costs, technical costs and on and off-site SEO
• If the site owner wants to ditch the sitelink on Bing! to help navigation and actually take users their own site content as expected, it seems that this site owner, and other webmasters need to monitor and occassionally edit their site-links using Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools!

Maybe this is a temporary glitch from Bing, but for now, what does affiliate links in SERP listings mean to you and to your users?

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