I have a PR 7 site with links from numerous respected sources. I have never bought a link, have related outbound links and have done only white hat SEO. My site is still indexed but my results dramatically dropped (first page rankings to 10th page) a few days ago. I have links to affiliates on most of the pages but all pages have unique, quality content. Could this be enough to cause the penalty? Did Google label me as a "thin affiliate"? How can I get the penalty removed? Should I be concerned about other sites with affiliate links? Was this penalty handed down by a new code or did an individual flag the site? Thanks for the help.
I would put rel no follow tags on your affiliate links. They pay you by sale, not for the page rank. I've seen a huge effect on pages that I had an affiliate link on - and then added the rel no follow to. And the code still works fine. Still get sales on them.
From your description, you sound like the perfect site (I wish my sites were that good). To get a PR7 without ever buying a link is commendable. I would ask how you get your links. Are your sites heavily interlinked. Have you participated in link exchange schemes? If we saw your site it would help.
Google has been hitting sites with affiliate links. Depending on how many links you are talking about, you can mask them using your htaccess file by creating fictitious urls to a made up directory i.e. www.yoursite.com/madeupdirectory/product1.html and then disallow that entire directory from robots. Looking at the pages sources code, it looks like links that only go to another page on your site, but those get redirected to the affiliate via htaccess when they are clicked.
Great advice! I'd prefer not to post the url here. When this happened to you, did you ever get the rankings back? With a no follow, will Google be able to detect that it's an affiliate link or do they totally ignore the link? We use programs like Linkshare and CJ so they wouldn't pass on PR anyway. I have link exchanges, but only with similar sites, no schemes. I got links in the beginning by asking, now they come in naturally.
For cloaking affiliate links, it is better to link them to a page in a folder on your site and block that folder with robots.txt and redirect with the affiliate link from there. The bots can still see nofollow links. Normally, there is no problem with having affiliate links as long as you have enough original content so it would be weird if that were the problem. I have a site about affiliate sites and it is mostly affiliate links and haven't seen any penalty nor with similar high profile sites.
I had a problem with a site that is 100% original content and which is 8 years old. It isn't even an affiliate site, but did have affiliate links so I could use product images. I was going to remove all the links if masking them didn't work - but it did.
contact the google support, they will give an answer, but i haven't seen much problem here, some times it just happens