I've read various comments & articles suggesting theories that a site that has too many / lots of affiliate links might suffer lower (than otherwise) Google search rankings. Has anyone experienced this? Has anyone removed a load of affiliate links and seen a subsequent rise in google rankings (or added a load of affiliate links and seen a drop in Serps?)
Avoid too many affiliate links in too short a time frame, consider showing reputed & branded affiliate links that will increase the credibility of your website.
Why not use the rel="nofollow" attribute in your affiliate links to prevent passing on any value or so called vote for the link? This will prevent your site from passing on any Pagerank or SEO weight to that affiliate link. This what I do on all my affiliate marketing pages.
I've tried adding "no-follow" tags to affiliate links, but it seemed to have little affect on any rankings. Google does register "no follow" links so if it wants to penalize sites with lots of affiliate links, that isn't a solution. I've a travel site that's been sandboxed for just over a year. Google seemingly refuses to send it any traffic. I'm going to remove almost all the affiliate links and see if google starts to show me some Serps love.
Chris, I have a site in the same boat. It has an affiliate link sitewide (ebay) and some other scattered affiliate links to Amazon. Nothing major, but late December the site took a hard hit. I lost all long tailed keyword traffic from Google and get maybe one visitor a day from Google. I have suspected affiliate links were the culprit as well. I nofollowed all those affiliate links a month ago and no change whatsoever. It's important to note that I did have great SERPS with the affiliate links followed. The great serps lasted for 6-7 months on a site just under 1 years of age. If you remove those affiliate links, you may want to request reinclusion. Good luck!
To many afilliates links = POOR PR wich is not bad for me at least SERPS nope i had a case where i had a site 10 outgoing links no where in the rankings Now it ranks very good with like 35 outgoing links So ?