I have a 4 month old site and it ranks quite well for competitive key phrases already. However, as soon as I add posts with affiliate links in, those posts rank considerably worse than other articles - they fail to even rank for very low competitive key phrases. But, other articles that don't have affiliate links in continue to rank well in google. Do you guys have any ideas why this could be?! I can only assume this is because my site is 'new', so those pages are under more scrutiny by google? If so, when will Google start giving me full ranking ability for my affiliate articles? Details: I use standard affiliate links (track.companyname/hit.php?w=etc), I nofollow each of the links and place no more than 1 link for every 100 words. All thoughts on why this is happening would be appreciated!
When you say affiliate links I'm assuming you're getting something in return when someone clicks those links?
I think you should try to cloak your links before posting or insert them into some texts. However the affiliate links don't affect anything on the content. I have not see anything like this before, because I have many posts that have affiliate links inserted but have nothing with google. Review again your keywords or backlinks may be help.
Sometimes an affiliate link can be a bad sign for your website. This is because google don't trust affiliate link that much.
Using links in content that you could make money off of makes it look like you're using the content to make money. According to Google Seo guru Matt Cutts Google knows people do this and his advice is to just make them "No Follow" links in other words don't let Google's spiders and bots come across them when they crawl your site.