1. If you are using wordpress 2.3 or later, please check your robots.txt setting. I have found issues many times with new sites that wordpress has done automate set on robots.txt to prevent all bots to index your site title. Yes, <title> . This file will cause robots to confuse with "cannot understand syntax" and bots can't crawl any further. The solution is, just create empty rebots.txt file and upload in root to prevent this. Or your site won't get indexed any new pages and ranking continious down. 2. Do not use meta refresh to cloak your affiliate link with any pages.. I did and just one link which linked from frontpage I forget to add rel="nofollow" cause my site dumped from #1 to #776. I had to delete that one and use 301 redirect that old destination to my homepage, then site ranked has been recovered within a week. The best way to make safety jump page is use 301 redirect from your target page to merchant. add this one to your .htaccess redirect 301 /page.html http://www.youraffiliatelink.com
I was always under the assumption affiliate links should be 302 and not 301 as you dont want to be leaking PR or TR to the affiliate and want your page to have a chance for ranking instead of the affiliate program owners domain.