Do Affiliate Links Damage Your Site?

Have you got a lot of affiliate links listed in your site? Ever wondered what the effect of all of these is?

The aim of any search engine is to be used by as many people as possible. That way they earn their commissions. If one of these people searches for a certain widget and the top 100 listings are all the same widget, just different affiliates giving the same widget's details and then pointing at the same shop, then there is little real choice for the person who ran the search. They are just getting the same result back many times, will get fed up and then try another search engine.

Therefore, it is in the search engines' interests to detect affiliate sites and only display the merchant. The obvious way is to look for long affiliate links through known affiliate providers.

But do they do this? I was looking at a few links pages on an existing site a while back and noticed that some were PR3, others PR4. When I looked carefully I realised that on some of the links pages I'd added affiliate links. I'd done this for 2 reasons - first the chance of a sales and second getting more content / links immediately. When I re-examined the pages every PR3 page had affiliate links.

But then so did a couple of the PR4 pages. So I looked more carefully and noticed that on the PR4 pages with affiliate links, the actual links were hidden from the search engines.

Now PR doesn't always exactly relate to traffic volumes. But I took it as an indication that Google didn't like pages with (3 or 4) affiliate links. That's not many at all.

So what do you do? Many people use redirects or as I've already talked about, put the affiliate link on one page and the rest of the site links internally to that page.