QED: does hiding affiliate links improve rankings?

Worth doing or not?

[1Lit]

Been hearing a lot of buzz about hiding affiliate links. Is there any hard evidence out that shows that Google marks a site as poorer "quality" only because it has affiliate links, even if the site boasts a significant amount of unique content?

Also which are the most robust and easy-to-implement methodologies for hiding affiliate links from search engines?

Cheers.

[edited by: tedster at 9:07 pm (utc) on Oct. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] edited to clarify [/edit]

[tedster]

I don't have any of the hard evidence you ask about, but I thought it would be good to kick off the discussion with the comments that Google's Adam Lasnik made in our forum about the topic:

Some general truisms when it comes to Google:

- If a site provides compelling information, entertainment, or tools and is then sprinkled (reasonably) with affiliate links, then it's likely to do well over time.

- If a site *starts* with affiliate links as the foundation, the chances for success are more slim *unless* it provides compelling info, entertainment, tools, etc.

In other words, if you're building an Amazon.com store, are there any strong reasons why someone would visit -- or even bookmark -- your site instead of just going straight to Amazon.com? If not, why would our users want us to prominently list your site?

[webmasterworld.com...]

Now the question those remarks bring up for me is this: does the obvious presence of affiliate links automatically flag the site for a human review? When the eval.google.com issue blew up 3 or 4 years back, there was a lot of content in the leaked documents about evaluating affiliate sites. I think a human review might be a bit tougher than a purely algorithmic evaluation.