Affiliate links affecting SEO?

[terrybarnes]

We are currently developing a site that is due to launch in the next month or two. It's vitally important the site is SEO friendly (I'm sure that's what most people say now!) so anything that affects that will have to be removed or revised.

What I am wondering is does having affiliate links from sites such as CJ and TradeDoubler affect your SEO standing on the major search engines?

There will be a lot of unique content on the site and there's only around 5 pages that will contain around 5 affiliate links on each page (a maximum of 25 in total)

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

[jimbeetle]

The only time affiliate are a problem are on "thin affiliate" pages, those with little or no unique content. If there's good, solid content on the pages besides the affiliate links there should be no problems.

[terrybarnes]

That's what I thought may be the case - as we'll be having descriptions leading into the affiliate links then we should be A okay. Thanks for the post.

[mfishy]

Either cloack your aff links or send the links to another page on your site directly and do a JS redirect from there. Yes, there is some reason to believe affiliate links can be a negative factor.

Before all you that rank on everything chime in, I realize that you can still score well with straight aff links. What I am contending is that it is a negative factor. There are, perhaps, over 100 factors, so having a few negative factors will not kiil you. This is an easy fix though

[jimbeetle]

Well, we'll just have to disagree on this then. I've never seen any evidence that affiliate links in and of themselves are a negative factor; if they were I wouldn't be an affiliate marketer. I've never had any reason to cloak an aff link.