Are Sites With Affiliate Links, 301 Redirects Penalized More Recently?

[philhendrie]

Somewhere around the jagger update I'd like to know if sites with affiliate links, 301 redirects, or repeated content within the same page were penalized by google.

My site is primarily a news site and is popular in its field. We feature links to outside sources, something similar to the drudgereport in our field, but we do have original articles and an active message board.

We also have product pages with links to the products of our affiliate partners with products that are closely related to our field. In the past these pages were very popular in google search. Top 1-5 places. Now they are no where to be seen (i can only find them if i type in unique words found on those pages). Overall our site has not been penalized and has a big PR.

So a couple of questions on why the dropoff from google.

1) Does google penalize 301 redirects to other sites?
I got sick of visitors saying they couldn't see the links (they had adblocker on, so I changed them all to a link to a page on our site that did a 301 in the header to the affiliate page). Is this a no no from google?

2) I've heard google penalizes affiliate links. Well actually i only have these redirects on my product pages not affiliate links. But could google be penalizing me by tracking where my visitors are going?

3) Or perhaps am I getting penalized for having duplicate (repeated) content within my own page? If I have two of the same product but with different colors I generally retype out the description so it is repeated twice. Does google think this is weird with repeated content on the same page? Or am I more likely to be penalized for having similar content to my affiliate partners' pages?

4) Am I getting penalized for having the same url with a dynamic product name? For example, most of these product pages that got dropped are in the form of www.mysite.com/widgets.php?product=widgetname
They are separate pages in terms of content but have a similar structure template. Is google against this type of thing? Would I be better off giving the pages differnt core URLs? so instead of
www.mysite.com/widgets.php?product=widgetname

do www.mysite.com/widgname.php

I don't think of myself as a spammer as my viewers enjoy my product pages and they are closely related to my field. But perhaps in the eyes of google I don't offer anything to anyone although I bring together all the products in one place and point out the best deals and also have exclusive discounts, not to mention my own reviews.