No Follow Tags

Don't want to give PR to an affiliate site

[noblehouse]

We just setting up a website now and a small part of it will have an affliate programme. We don't want to give PR to this affiliate programme and somebody suggested to me to use a "no follow" meta tag to the link.

Can I use the nofollow tag for just one link on the page whilst all others get followed (no links to other sites, just throughout ours)?

Is this the correct way not to give page rank to the affilate programme website?

Who uses them sucessfully for the same reason we want to?

Is it true, the url will show up different when you go through to the affiliate page, and if so how?

Thanks in advance for any help with these basic questions!

[CanadianChris]

The nofollow tag may or may not work for you. I've heard mixed reviews about the overall success of it. I think when the SE's first mentioned it they hadn't finished developing the spider code for it and they're still developing it. Can't hurt to try it :)

A couple of alternatives for you:
-use javascript links to your affiliate program, the se's still don't read js.
-use the robots meta tag "NOFOLLOW"
-depending on how you've setup your site, you could use robots.txt to prohibit the search engines from crawling the pages that send you to the affiliate program, but this would only really work if you have a redirect page or something like that.

[hunderdown]

The "NOFOLLOW" attribute is meant to be used only in blogs. If you use it in affiliate links, you are entering a gray area, which may or may not cause trouble for you. When it was first announced, I read up on it--there's some information on the Google site--and decided not to use it in my affiliate links.