hi guys I was thinking, should i put OR DOES ANYONE PUT a NOFOLLOW tag on their affiliate codes? So its less outgoing links? I am in the #2 spot under the affialite I sell for - i am wondering if adding the NOFOLLOW tag will help me rank above him or hurt me? THOUGHTS?
I don't think it will matter to their URL's ranking even if you nofollow the link. Your affiliate link is likely pointing to a landing page on their site. And if the affiliate link URL contains your affiliate ID as a query string parameter (e.g. something like http://www.example.com/landingpage.php?aid=123), as long as the source for the landing page does not render with <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/landingpage.php"> in the <head> then each affiliate's link is technically pointing to a different URL and in they eyes of the search engines... a different page. In this case, the URL canonicalization issues that are caused by the query string parameter will prevent your link from helping their landing page URL rank. That being said... You "might" want to modify the way you link to them anyway. I always use a redirector page on my sites and block the redirector page with my robots.txt. Any time someone clicks on an affiliate link, that link points first to my redirector page. The redirector page then redirects the browser to the affiliate URL. By passing the the click through the redirector page that is blocked by robots.txt, no PR will be passed to them. They won't get credit for the inbound link. One advantage of a redirector page is that it can be coded to count the number of times people click on the link. If you don't want to use a redirector page (it may be overkill) then you can simply use the rel="nofollow" attribute on your affiliate links. Michael Wolf wrote a decent post on cloaking affiliate links (in a whitehat way... not cloaking in the sense of showing search engines one thing, users another) a few weeks back. Maybe reading it will help you decide.
Unless you're promoting your own site I think you should use "nofollow" attribute for affiliate link.
I use a nofollow. When I saw the actual site creeping up in the rankings to the second page I put it for all three of my front page results and saw it die away.
i do think it wont matter at all. in the brighter side of it your website will benefit from it because you are reducing your outbound link and reducing link juice
With Affiliate , Matt Cutts recommended everybody should mask nofollow. If not, google will punish you !
Has this happened to you? I've used no-follow attribute on affiliate links for years and nothing has ever occurred. Everyone's experience can differ, that I know. A php-redirect may possibly be the best method but there are several methods that work. Some redirects also get read as broken links by crawlers.
Always nofollow affiliate links. You should actually be cloaking those links in the first place. I personally use redirects or URL shortening scripts (self hosted of course). Don't waste time researching it, it's one of the most basic best practices of affiliate marketing. Most tracking software will have the redirect function built in, so you don't have to go through a lot of trouble manually configuring the redirects. Don't worry about the nofollow, worry about the link itself...