tedster - 8:26 pm on Oct 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

Not all affiliates - there are plenty who do quite well with Google. Here's a quote from Google's Adam Lasnik, from a discussion called "Avoiding penalties against 'thin affiliate' pages":

Some general truisms when it comes to Google: - If a site provides compelling information, entertainment, or tools and is then sprinkled (reasonably) with affiliate links, then it's likely to do well over time. - If a site *starts* with affiliate links as the foundation, the chances for success are more slim *unless* it provides compelling info, entertainment, tools, etc. In other words, if you're building an Amazon.com store, are there any strong reasons why someone would visit -- or even bookmark -- your site instead of just going straight to Amazon.com? If not, why would our users want us to prominently list your site? Getting "fat" means adding value... and, more specifically, a value that is distinct or greater than the value derived from the actual ecommerce site itself. [webmasterworld.com...]

I have no reason to think that advice is not still valid. But I am concerned about the report that opened this thread. If the article was worth good ranking before, then the addition of the affiliate link should not have harmed it, according to the above quote.

So what is going on? As Adam also said in the linked thread, be careful about assumed causation. Just because one event is followed by another does not mean that it caused the second event. Other events may also be involved. For example, was the article scraped and published elsewhere?

At any rate, since msafi has now removed that link, it will be interesting to see if the traffic returns.