Quadrille - 12:08 pm on Oct 12, 2008 (gmt 0)

An interesting thread, but on balance, it seems most unlikely that the affiliate link has anything to do with it.

Instead of just looking at the one page, it might be wiser to look at the whole site, and see if anything is going on that is more likely to have caused the problem.

Do other pages on the site link to the same (or related) affiliate?

Is the affiliate a quality page?

Does the article where the link was placed have unique and original content?

How old is the page? And the site?

There's something we don't know, and msafi needs to look again at the link, the page, and the site; If Google has started strong penalties against pages because of one javascript link to an affiliate site, then there should be thousands of panicking webmasters joining this thread!