Will adding cj links hurt Google rankings?

[drall]

We usually deal direct with advertisers and use our own system to promote advertiser products on our website but we have been wanting to test out CJ and wanted to ask if anyone knows if adding links from cj promoting products on your pages has hurt anyones rankings in Google.

I have read so much stuff in regards to affiliate links hurting google rankings and just cant seem to find a semi murky answer.

Thanks

[tedster]

Affiliate links do not hurt, at least not "by definition". But affiliate links as the main focus of a page can kill its rankings.

What Google wants to see is a good resource - something different than the other blah-blah-blah out there on the same topic. If you've got that, then some modest affiliate linking is not a problem.

[drall]

Thanks Tedster! These pages all rank well and have pretty different content then our competitors. They only have 1-2 adsense ads on each page and thats about it.

Most of my comp has 3-4 adsense ads, text hover type ads and 3 affiliate ads per page. We wanted to test 1-2 adsense ads and 1 cj offer.

[panicbutton]

Why not try one aff link on one page and see what happens? My experience is that a single aff link can kill a page's ranking if the page isn't strong enough. Conversely, if you have enough Google juice then you can pretty much chuck whatever you want on the page and it'll still rank.

[drall]

Yep that's a good idea. I added one small cj ad to a couple popular pages.

I dont know if we have enough Google juice but the site we are testing it on is pr6 and has around 200k ibl's. The pages we are testing it on are around 6 years old.