Rel=nofollow for affiliate links?

[socialtowards]

Hi,

For a holiday/travel website including hotels and holiday packages from affiliates I am currently using the rel="nofollow" attribute to link out to the affiliate's website and wanted to know if this is the right way?

To be more precise: there are distinct pages for each city and on a city specific page there are ~50 available hotels listed with some other information such as price and address, etc. Each of these hotels have an outlink to the affiliate's hotel website which uses private branding and as such is running on a subdomain hotels.mytraveldomain.tld. So in order not to pass on the link juice to the affiliate's website I thought I would simply use rel="nofollow".

Would you also use nofollow? or are there any other opinions out there about that?

[vforvinnie]

I do a combination of things.

First, I mask my affiliate urls.  I do domain.com/purchase34.php which redirects to the affiliate URL.  This might also help your click rate, as the purchase or buy or book.php URL looks better than a lot of affiliate URLs out there.

Then I block that /purchase with robots.txt.

Finally I still no-follow the links.

This works pretty well for me, none of the purchase URLs show up in Google and I don't believe any of them are passing link juice.

Cheers,

Vinnie

[socialtowards]

Thanks for the idea of using a PHP redirect script instead of the affiliate URL, I like that one!

Cheers