Affiliate Links

Are you going to tag them as "no follow"

[graywolf]

Since the purpose of your affiliate links is to get people to click on them and complete the sale, not to pass along any anchor text or green bar I'm considering making them all "no follow" links.

Anybody else thinking of doing it? Anybody think it's a bad idea?

[spike2131]

Yeah, I just did it to most of my affiliate links. I can't think of any reasons not to, but if anyone can think of any, I'd like to hear them.

[adamxcl]

I was selective on a first pass. I have some pages that I know don't go anywhere to be indexed in a good way, but I do have some affiliate pages that actually get indexed as their own page. So it would depend on the type of page and program, rather than a blanket decision.

[GerBot]

I know of a few affiliate programs where the merchant's site is ranking high in Google as a result of all their inbound affiliate links.
It may be that this new link will hit them the hardest.

[sweetberry]

Hi

I use the LinkShare program and their affiliate banner code is quite bulky and contains a HREF link to LinkShare and the image source within the <a href> tags is the actual merchant (i.e. [merchant-xyz.com)....]

Does anyone have any ideas on how Google interprets this?
Does it see one or two outbound links, or does Google ignore the affiliate code completely?
Can it hurt my rankings in any way?

Thanks.