Hello, I have been thinking about setting up an affiliate program for a client. So instead of going through for instance tradedoubler pay the affiliates directly without someone else taking a cut. Whilst looking into that I have seen that some software offers "SEO friendly" links, i.e., they use the referal site to find out where the sale comes from. This seem like a huge advantage (as this is a client with quite a few affiliates at the moment) but what does big google think of this? Anyone have a idea or experience with this. It seems like a stellar way of getting quite a few natural links from very relevant websites. I can't or won't do anything that can get the client penalized, just not worth it, but what is the worst that can happen? Can we be penalized by google and all the rankings drop? Or will just these links get discreditted? Or is this an ok way of doing things? And I am sorry, posted this a week ago in link development but not a single answer, so thought it might be the wrong sub-forum, and I would really love to get an answer about this, really want do anything so I can get punished from google.
I don't think anyone can say for sure what will happen because, as far as I know, Google still has not released their official standings on this direct situation. We can only try and interpret and use some logical thinking to determine the way that Google treats affiliate links. When dealing with paid links, Google wants to see a rel="nofollow" attribute on the link. Affiliate links would be a grey area in terms of whether they are considered as paid links or not since Google hasn't given a straight answer that I am aware of. To be safe, I would suggest using the "non-SEO Friendly" linking structure, using buffer pages to make sure PR is not passed. While it is possible that Google would not penalize your client's site for having PR passed, Google would likely choose to not recognize the links as true links and just treat them as noFollow. You likely have nothing to gain, but do have something you could lose.