Will we lose page rank by using an affiliate programme?

[noblehouse]

Myself and a friend have just set up a large travel guide/ezine which is due to be uploaded in the coming weeks, fingers crossed! lol.

We want to use an affliate programme for booking hotels on the website but we have been worried by rumours that if we use an affiliate site it will somehow take some of our page ranking and we will lose out in the SEOs.

Is there any truth to this?

Would we be better linking from our website on the front page to a totally different website we have created, and run the affiliate programme from there so we do not risk losing page ranking on our main website?

Any help for some newbies be much appreciated, thanks in advance.

[jcoronella]

Any link that you put on your site will drain your PR (for Google at least, and likely a similar effect for the others), however, one more link on a page with a lot other links should not affect it *that* much.

The big problem most encounter with affiliate programs and ranking, is a site that is nothing but a conduit for the affiliate program. If you have a site, and are now adding an affiliate program that is suitable to the content you shouldn't have a problem. The key is to have pages that are of value to the user, and not just a doorway to the affiliate program.

To avoid the loss of PR/WR, you could either cloak off the links for spiders, or hide the link with javascript. These could be considered risky by some, and if you have a squeeky clean site may not be worth the minimal loss in PR/WR.

[Pedent]

Do bear in mind that PR (pagerank) and page rank are two different things.

Pagerank is Google's measure of the importance of your site (or, more accurately, of each different page of your site). You can get a rough indication of this (a number from 1 to 10) by installing the Google toolbar. Outgoing links will diminish your PR.

PR, however, is only one of many factors in determining where your page ranks on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), and is now much less important than it used to be. Losing PR may not have an adverse impact on your position in the SERPs.

I don't think that setting up a second site for your affiliate links is a good idea. First of all, the links on your main site will leak the same amount of PR no matter where they go to. Second, by complicating the buying process, you're likely to reduce the number of visitors that convert into customers.

[noblehouse]

Thanks both of you for your help so far, I've got another question for you below, and also based on the information I can given you can you give me your opinion or whether you would or would not run the affiliate from the main website?

Sorry, not mastered the Quote feature on here yet!

"The big problem most encounter with affiliate programs and ranking, is a site that is nothing but a conduit for the affiliate program. If you have a site, and are now adding an affiliate program that is suitable to the content you shouldn't have a problem. The key is to have pages that are of value to the user, and not just a doorway to the affiliate program."

The sites very large and not made purely for the affilate programme, it will just be a small part of the site really the rest(130-150 pages so far) is all related information to the area we are offering to book the hotels in.

"To avoid the loss of PR/WR, you could either cloak off the links for spiders, or hide the link with javascript."

We don't want to do anything that risks us getting penalized.

"Outgoing links will diminish your PR."

If the website we have an outgoing link to has a high PR will that dimish us more or less than if it had a low PR?

"I don't think that setting up a second site for your affiliate links is a good idea. First of all, the links on your main site will leak the same amount of PR no matter where they go to. Second, by complicating the buying process, you're likely to reduce the number of visitors that convert into customers."

The first point is very useful. The second point I was worried about myself, I didn't want to take buyers to a whole new site that may put them off with the last second internet buying jitters.

[Pedent]

"Outgoing links will diminish your PR."

If the website we have an outgoing link to has a high PR will that dimish us more or less than if it had a low PR?

That makes no difference. Your link passes the same amount of PR to the site that you're linking to irrespective of where the link goes.

Two things that do make a difference, though:

(1) The more links on the page, the less PR is passed through each of them.

(2) If the page that you're linking to links back, then you'll get some of the PR back.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that PR is everything for ranking well. Getting incoming links with keyword rich anchor text is much more important (as are a couple of other things). Someone even started a thread in the Google News forum recently asking whether PR is factor at all anymore.

To quote, enclose the text in "quote" and "/quote" tags, with the tags enclosed in square brackets.

[foxtunes]

What about using the no follow tag on affiliate links?

[noblehouse]

What are and how do I use 'no follow' tags? Can they be used on all affilaite programmes? Will that mean I can use the programme on my site without leaking any of my PR to them?

[foxtunes]

Here's a no follow link, should stop pr from draining to your affiliate links:

<a href="http://www.widgeteer.com" rel="nofollow">

If you also title the link, folks won't see those ugly 80 character affiliate urls either.

[noblehouse]

Thanks for that Foxtunes,

Is this in anyway a dodgy thing to put on our website that may get us penalised?

Do many people use a 'no follow' link on here sucessfully with no problems? Do they work?

[ronin]

You'll find people using rel="nofollow" in their links for all sorts of reasons, but bear in mind that, in theory at least, the attribute is an indication to search engines that:

"I'm the author of this page but I didn't put this link here. The presence of this link on this page is not an endorsement of the content it leads to."

[noblehouse]

Which should be beneficial then right? Because we only want customers to use the link, and not lose page rank by SE's following it?

Is that all correct as I understand it?

Is this the best way to deal with our situation?

[dutch_dude]

Theories of losing your site's pagerank "pagerank leakage" through outgoing links are total nonsense in my opinion. Never seen proof of it and it does not make any sense at all. However the more links on a page, the less PR a single link gives to the linked page, that is true.

If you do not want the affiliate program to get PR from your links and profit from it by competing with you in the SERPS, nofollow should work.

[Pedent]

External links leak PR because the more PR you're sending through external links, the less is being recycled around your site. I don't think PR is important enough that you should let this drive the way you design your site though, at least not to a great degree.

[limitup]

I wouldn't worry about getting penalized for using javascript links. It is a very common practice and no one that I know of has ever been penalized for using javascript links. After all, why would you get penalized for it?