On my site, it is in the early stages, but composed mostly of Affiliate products or sites that I link to under the description and pic, along with a couple of my own products mixed in. My question is--Will this be getting me a bad rating with the search engines if I have all these outgoing links? I've heard the term "link farm" before. Is this what I'm heading toward and is it bad? Thanks for any input.
I don't think it would give you bad seo... it would just raise the seo of your affiliates by giving them "backlinks"
if don't overuse them I don't think you will have any problems. You can also use redirects, there are some nice tips and scripts on another thread on DP, try searching for it if you are interrested.
You should be fine unless, as drugoon said, you go over the top and insert a large number of affiliate links on every single page without any relevant content. And for the "link farms" part. Don't worry about that either. It has nothing to do with you. The term refers to websites with usually artificially inflated (or fake) page ranks which consist of large amount of unrelated and uncategorized links. They call themselves "directories" and in most cases charge you a fee for joining them. They don't offer any useful service to the visitors and usually the only reason those sites were set up is to make a few quick bucks. Stay away from that kind of sites. I don't think joining them will harm your rating but it certainly wont benefit your site in any way. Cheers
Yes. They can harm your SEO if the affiliates have bad reputation. So be careful what programs u use.
Thanks everyone, good to know! I was starting to worry that it was the reason I've never seen a visitor from google yet, but looks like it's something else.
As long as your page doesn't look like a spammy outbount link farm to affiliats it shouldn't be a problem.