Hiding your affiliate links from the SE's

what is the easiest way to do this?

[Justinnerd]

I'm a newb to affiliate marketing, but am just in love with it so far!
I set up a site for a nitch product, submitted to ink a few months ago and am now still getting great free Yahoo traffic and making a great profit.

My product is very nitch, so I know that I should have no problem getting good position in Google. The only problem is those pesky affiliate links. Google has me at the bottom of the list for all my top keywords (penalized I guess) I am almost 99% sure that this is because of my affiliate links.

What is the easiest and best way to hide my links from Google so it will index it like a normal page and not something that appears to them to be low quality?

thanks for your help!

[hannamyluv]

Cloaking?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[eljefe3]

I really don't think it's the affiliate links unless those are the only links you have. Still google shouldn't penalize you for this as there are many "one page wonders" out there that have nothing but affiliate links and do quite well.

Have you considered getting some inbound links to your site so you rank better?

[Justinnerd]

I do have inbound links. Although alomost all of my outbound links are to affiliate sites. I am targeting very specific keywords

When I do a search for a VERY specific phrase on my site that doesn't exist anywhere else in the google database except on my page, 3 sites come up and I am at the bottom.

Are you positive that affiliate links have nothing to do with this? I do have about 15 other sites that do fine in Google but don't have affiliate links on them.

thanks for you help! ;)

[domingo]

Try using mod_rewrite if you are hosted on Apache.

[graywolf]

I have 3 sites with affiliate links that are ranked and come up. They are in moderately competitive areas. However they all have lots of other pages with original content (25-50 pages on two sites, 300+ pages on the third).

[Justinnerd]

I know that when using CJ, it is useful to use their tool that hides the affiliate link from the user.

This doesn't have any bearing on SE ranking does it?

[Justinnerd]

One more question:

So what i'm hearing in this thread is that all the hype about Google penalizing sites that have affiliate links is just not true?

[mfishy]

<<This doesn't have any bearing on SE ranking does it? >>

That's correct. None of this has any bearing if you aren't a complete link farm.

[macrost]

Use an xml feed if one is available. Once you do, just worry about duplicate content. :)

[europeforvisitors]

I have affiliate links on nearly every one of my 4,000 or so pages, and my site does extremely well in Google. I don't think Google has anything against affiliate links per se; affiliate sites that do poorly in Google are probably suffering because of duplicate content (such as merchant-supplied boilerplate pages) or risky SEO techniques.