All, I have read many threads regarding Affiliattes and how a search engine can punish you for having an affiliate program. Of course, it's obvious to spot and abuser, but my question is what is the difference between and affiliate program and a partnership program? For example, our site has a handlful of very close partners we are working with and we do interlink because it promotes legitimate business (They build it, we sell it). Could this be misconstrued as an affiliate program since we get a commission and they get a % of the sale? Where is the line drawn?
That's a good question. I don't think those sites should be penalized at all, and currently I'm not convinced that they are. I have yet to really get into SEO but I think it's believed that a page loses a little bit of rank for every outgoing link. I have also read that Google says non-permanent links are penalized. Mask the affiliate link with a redirect. It may also be helpful to do things like put nofollow on the links and disallow spiders from crawling the redirect using robots.txt. Sorry there is no more info I can add.
In the case of links between sites that actually work together closely - I don't think there is a problem. But if the amount of links is too much (like one for every product) I would put a rel=nofollow attribute in each link. You are getting payed per sale, not for the added google-rank of your partner-site.
I think the main problem with affiliates and search engines is for the affiliates themselves. Not so much for the main company that is running the affiliate program. Google discounts sites that have lots of affiliate coded outgoing links. Why should a site that does affiliate marketing for "Company A" rank better than Company A's site? Who should be more relevant to a search for those products? The main company or the affiliate? The company should. Most affiliate type links do not pass link weight back to "Company A". The added coding in the links make them not crawlable by spiders. So these links don't help, they don't hurt either (for Company A). But they can hurt the affiliate. There are ways around this though. The links can be hidden from google. And they can be coded in such a way so as to allow link weight to be passed to the main Company A site. But affiliates are not happy to use these types of links. When an affiliate ends up helping the main company get better rankings, and that company makes more sales because of it, those sales from SE traffic are not attributed to the affiliate and they don't get commissions.