How commercial links work here

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Some links on this site may earn a commission. Here is exactly what that does and does not affect.

An affiliate offer is a separate object from the product it points at. That separation is not filing tidiness — it is the mechanism. The search index does not read the offers table. The ranking calculation has no offer input and no join to it. The publication gate does not consult offers at all. An offer can be added, paused, or removed with no effect on a product’s facts, its eligibility to be published, or its position in any list, because the code that decides those things has no path to the data.

That claim is tested rather than promised. An automated check captures the ranked result set, attaches an approved commercial offer to a published product, rebuilds the index, and asserts the ordering is unchanged. It runs on demand and fails loudly if the ordering ever moves.

Ranking weight is calculated from how complete and well-sourced a record is: how many facts have been approved, whether country availability has been reviewed, whether a summary exists. There is no popularity signal and no commercial signal, and the reason is that a field which does not exist cannot be quietly weighted later.

Where a commercial link appears, the disclosure is shown before the button rather than after it, the real destination host is displayed, and the link goes directly there. There is no redirect that hides where you are going. Only one commercial link is shown per product, and products with no commercial relationship are displayed exactly the same way as those with one.