juliat72 - 9:02 am on Aug 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

We have a large site that feeds into an affiliated site, up till now they have provided a solution so that search generated pages appear to remain part of our site using a sub-domain. However they have stopped support for this and we now have to change over to direct links with our affiliate code in, so it will suddenly seem like we are pointing a hell of a lot of links to this one external site.

If we put nofollow on the links will Google see this as a good thing? Should we find another way of "hiding" the links or does Google just recognise that it is an affiliate link?

We are not concerned about PR or anything like that, we just want to minimise any potential "damage" with the change in linking. The site currently ranks very well for its main terms.