This is weird but i have a site that has about 300 pages , for some reason google is ranking only my pages that have no affiliate links , at first i thought it was a coincidence but when i checked my rankings for every page , only my pages with no affiliate links ranked high ,,, the others are nowhere to be found in the serps .... i took out my affiliate links on one of my pages , and to my surprise a week later it ranked in the top ten for that particular keyword ... is google cracking down on affiliate links ?
How does google decide if the link is a affiliate link or just a regular link? Was the page and the affiliate you linked to subject related?
What about doing a test by taking a page, cloaking the links on that page and then doing a nofollow or blocking in javascript or robots.txt so it won't be spidered. I'm wondering if your problem could be a result of Google's paid links rule? Did those pages rank before or were they always a problem?
i dont think the reason is affiliate links. what are the keywords for your site? is there any big competition for for the pages which are not receiving visitors
I agree, you need to look at other factors as well. Have you made some changes to your site recently?
Do your pages that have no affiliate links have more content. If so you could be fitting the definition of a thin affiliate!
Well, I have a rule of thumb: if I think that I would do something, I presume Google would do it. So, applied to this, I guess original products have greater value than affiliates, so if I was G I would rank lower the affiliates. This would be my personal rule. I've never thought about it before you said it here but now I think I have a case where I can apply my rule