The rel attribute mistake on affiliate links that wastes crawl budget

The rel attribute mistake on affiliate links that wastes crawl budget

The failure: leaving affiliate/cloaked links as plain dofollow, OR blanket-nofollow-ing them and also leaving the redirect crawlable. Google wants commercial links tagged rel="sponsored" (or nofollow). Untagged, you risk a link-scheme flag; double-misconfigured, Googlebot crawls thousands of /go/ redirect URLs and burns crawl budget on pages that should be blocked.

The fix:
— Cloaked links: add rel="sponsored nofollow" on the outbound
— Block the redirect directory in robots.txt: Disallow: /go/ so crawlers don't waste budget chasing redirects
— Most cloakers have a 'noindex the redirect' setting — turn it on

Gotcha nobody mentions: if you block /go/ in robots.txt, Google can't see the rel=sponsored on the redirect target — but that's fine, because the attribute lives on the LINK in your content, which Google does crawl. People block the wrong layer and panic.

Bottom line: tag the link sponsored, robots-block the redirect folder — do both, not one.