How linking works

Worth ten minutes, because most confusion about AffyLink comes from not knowing these rules.

Nothing is rewritten

Your posts in the database are untouched. When a reader loads a page, a small script looks at the text, finds your keywords, and turns them into links right there in the browser.

The consequences of that are all good ones:

• Turning AffyLink off returns your site to exactly what you wrote. There is no cleanup and no orphaned shortcodes.
• Changing a link's destination changes it everywhere at once, including in posts from 2018.
• No plugin has to run on every save, and nothing can corrupt your content.

Longest match wins

If you have keywords for both "desk" and "standing desk", and a post says "standing desk", you get one link, on "standing desk".

Longer phrases win because they are more specific, and specific links convert better. Where two keywords are the same length, the older one wins — so the behaviour is stable rather than depending on which one happened to load first.

Where links can appear

Only in the body of your content.

Deliberately never in:

• headings (h1, h2, h3)
• navigation, headers and footers
• comments

Those exclusions are not configurable, and that is on purpose. A heading full of affiliate links looks like spam, a navigation bar full of them looks broken, and linking inside reader comments means putting your affiliate tag on somebody else's words.

Every link is marked

Every link AffyLink adds carries rel="nofollow sponsored". That is what search engines expect on a paid link, and it is what Amazon's terms require. It is not a setting.

Links point at the destination

The href is the affiliate URL itself. Your readers go straight where they are going — no hop through our servers.

This is faster, it does not leak your traffic through a third party, and if AffyLink went offline entirely your existing links would keep working, because they are ordinary links to ordinary URLs.

Clicks are recorded separately, in the background, after the reader has already left.

How many times a keyword links

Once per keyword per page, on the first occurrence. Five mentions of "standing desk" in a review gets you one link, not five. Repeating the same link down a page does not earn more clicks; it just looks desperate.