Site penalized for linking to affiliate site?

Has anyone else experienced this? My site used to rank in the top 20 on Google for a couple key words, but dropped to 200th after adding two affiliate links to Linkshare. They're my only outbound links on the site.

Should I just use a redirect instead of a hard link?

 

they have nothing to do on your ranking. There are lots of sites having too much affiliate links on them but still ranking high,
maybe you build tons backlinks in a short period of time?

 

I have seen other people also say it doesn't affect rankings, but it's such a simple site and there are no other variables that changed besides the affiliate links.

 

Other competitors might be optimizing well there keywords that you were targeting earlier, I guess this could be one of the reason.

 

it does not matter, i do have a lot of affiliate links but it won't harm any ranking as long as you put a nofollow and noindex tag with them.. atleast i do and safe from any penality yet

 

May be it is justing some updating of Google goes onwards. I had a website which ranked very well for certain highly competitive keywords and it suddenly disappeared. And I cannot find out the reason at that time. About a month later the website came up again, and the ranking was even better than before.

So I think there is no need to panic unless you are sure that you have done something wrong.

 

Try masking your links and see if your SERP's improve.

 

What do you mean with "masking links"? Do you mean nofollow or something like hiding them??

I think trying to hide links from SEs is not a good idea.

 

No, you can use Tiny URL or .htaccess with a redicect to make them appear to be same site links but land on your affiliate page.

 

Directly from Google:

Source:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361

 

it does affect, have personal experience

 

I don't think that saying that other sites do it and they don't get affected is a strong argument. When a site is trustworthy for the search engines they can go away with a lot of stuff because in the other hand they have a good authority. But if a site with no or little authority does something risky it'll probably get hit.

 

I use nofollow in those types of links. I have linkshare too.

 

Thanks for the tips

 

I guess I just wont worry about it for now, and keep working on my content (which is all original to begin with anyway).

 

nofollow is always the better way to go when linking to outside sites if you're not trying to give them search ranking juice from your link. Even link masks and tinyurl...