Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google does not “pass signals through a lot of different kinds of links,” when asked if Google automatically nofollow Amazon affiliate links.

He added “so I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case here,” referencing the Amazon affiliate links.

I believe since before the nofollow attribute, Google probably had methods of not passing link signals from well known affiliate link patterns including Amazon, Commission Junction and others.

I suspect Google still has those methods but has added a whole deeper way of determining which links those are and handling it on a much more broad manner.

Here is John’s tweet:

Forum discussion at Twitter.