Multiple one-way links bad?

Should I affiliate?

[ariff44]

Thank you for your help in advance:
I have a PR6 site that is currently generating about 16,000 unique visitors per month. One of my competitors has approached me about fowarding all of my traffic to his site in exchange for a higher converstion ratio, lead payments and just in general a higher profit potentially.

However, my site has over 250 links that funnel directly to my join page. If was to foward all of my traffic to him, I would have to replace all 250 links that lead to my join page to his.

He has agreed to put a link from his site to mine on his homepage (his site is PR5).

1. Does Google count all links from a site or just one?

2. Will this hurt my rankings?

3. How can I go about this in a profitable way?

[cwnet02]

Sounds bad to me.

If he wants your traffic (and you seem ready to give it to him?) then why don't you simply sell your site to him?

[ariff44]

I would like to but that is not an option they are interested in, at least not right away.

Will it hurt my rankings with that many links to their site?

[jomaxx]

I don't really understand the value proposition, but presumably you are confident that this will work out to you making money off the traffic somehow.

The answer is yes, all those links out will hurt your site's PR and your Google rankings to some degree. You can avoid this by using a redirect script that Google can't spider (e.g. exclude it via the robots.txt), but your competitor likely wants a PR boost and may object to that.

[cwnet02]

I don't think giving your competitor 250 links will hurt your ranking immediatly but of course it will increase the ranking of your competitor.

Scenario:

You and maybe a couple of other competitors give thousands of links to this competitor and sooner or later he will ourank you in SE results.

Now what? You have a lower ranking, meaning less visitors, meaning less visitors you send to your competitor, meaning less "lead payments" etc..

Additionaly, by sending all your visitors to him, you loose your identity to existing and future visitors (clients?).

You are turning your website into a doorway page to your competitor.

By allowing your competitor to "hijack" your visitors (clients?) you are putting yourself out of business.

Well, I guess you can see that I really don't like the concept of affilates and again:

If your competitor wants your business, let him pay for it!

You have a PR of 6 and 16.000 visitors a month? Wild guess: 1-2 years of developing your site? And you give it away to become an affiliate of some smart a..?

[ariff44]

I appreciate your responses. I don't know what to do. We are very similar sites but they are a company and I am just a regular Joe but because of hard work I was able to capture a lot of market share. The thing is though, is that my conversion ratio is very low. I only convert about 1% to paying subscribers.

If I use their technology, I feel I can convert a lot more.

So you think if I include their link in a robot.txt file so Google can't follow it, I'll be fine?

[Dinkar]

I think you should use javascript link to redirect your traffic to them. Search engines don't read javascript so your site will be safe.

[jomaxx]

Javascript is fine, or look into how robots.txt files work. You would have to do a redirect because there's no way to exclude external links.