Although in the UK, we don’t require any disclosure on whether you are making money on a link, many bloggers do provide some sort of disclosure as a form of best practice.
But what if you don’t quite realise that you should be disclosing? There has been a significant increase in the past few months of links being posted that are affiliate links, but not being disclosed.
We use rewardStyle for affilate links for certain shops. rewardStyle gives you the ability to easily share affiliate links on Facebook and Twitter, but doesn’t put any sort of disclosure on the tweet, so some people may not realise that it should be disclosed.
According to new FTC disclosures about social media, advertisers should put “Ad:” at the start of the tweet. Whilst this isn’t law in the UK, it’s a good idea to do something similar to this.
There’s also been an increase in the last year or so of bloggers receiving credits for linking to specific pages and products to help increase the companies search rating. Yep, you need to be disclosing those as well (and technically, you should be marking those as “do not follow” for the various search engines benefit).
Put basically: if you receive any sort of payment or credit for linking to something, you need to be disclosing it.
Have you noticed links not being disclosed? How do you feel when you’re not told about a link being an affiliate one?
I think it mostly bugs me when people don’t disclose *because* I see other bloggers disclosing happily and I think “Well if they can do it why aren’t you bothering?”. I must admit tho, I don’t know what “do not follow” is?! :)
I have been seeing an increasing number of these on facebook and have often wondered, thank you for the great post.