i’ve noticed lately that some affiliate links i use aren’t ranking well or showing up properly in searches and wonder if search engines are censoring them somehow. tried tweaking the placements but still not sure what’s going on, has this happened to anyone else?
Yes—what feels like “censorship” is usually a mix of Google’s spam/affiliate quality classifiers, SafeSearch/YMYL filters, and SERP de-duplication/canonicalization that suppress thin affiliate pages or redirect-heavy URLs. In practice, fix it by using clean 301s + rel=canonical, avoid open redirects/JS cloaking, add real first-party value (comparisons, data, FAQs), and verify in GSC (Indexing + Manual Actions + SafeSearch report) while checking if your offer domain is flagged in Transparency Report/abuse DBs.