I heard late last year that google was slapping a lot of review style pages but more importantly pages where they'd detect affiliate links. Since I clearly missed the scoop on this when it first happened, I was wondering what the situation was if someone could clarify for me.
Hmm, that would be a shame considering the major search engines, Google especially, are technically affiliates themselves and rely heavily on these same principals for the bulk of their own revinue.
Yes, you should use a review site for the article you're promoting and optimizing it for search engines, don't promote sites with direct affiliate link or try to cloak it...
Well given the lack of a strong answer here it's not as serious as it sounded in the article that I read about how affiliate links on a site are detected by google and slapped as a result.
I also read somewhere a while back that affiliate links hurt your SERPs, I personally havent noticed it. I would advise you just cloak your links and do not have many of them.
I wouldn't make that assumption. It is most certainly that serious and Google will slap that campaign and sometimes suspend the account. I know many affiliate marketers that were banned from google just for these review style pages with uncloaked affiliate links. Of course, it is google and they have no rhyme or reason so what goes through once for one person gets hammered by the next. In my experience, you are always better off to use a domain forwarding or other form of cloaking.
I'm not sure what my form of linking would be referred to as. I do a redirect essentially because I'll have a link which is for a different page on my site which is actually just a redirect to the publisher. So given that that's how I have my affiliate links arranged, would google pick up on that?
Google is totally against affiliate marketers, so putting the no follow tag in your links will solve the issue. I agree with scheng1
I don't think Google is against affiliates. I think they're against Affiliatism. You know, when marketers put out reams of crappy pages and links that provide the end user with close to zero value or usefulness, and websites created for no other reason than the prospect of making bank at their expense. With that in mind, it would follow naturally that Google will not de-rank a site because it features affiliate links. But it will likely remove a site because it's riddled with affiliate links and adds nothing useful to the Internet. Which is actually neat, since otherwise we'd go back to the ... y'know, pre-google era - that's when search engine queries rarely delivered relevant results.
Well, considering Affiliate Networks are competition to Google Adsense... is it any wonder that Google would penalize the competition in their own search engine? Google has bills to pay too!