Does Google Consider a Follow Affiliate Link into my site a paid link?

[Robertnweil1]

Let's say I have a link coming into my domain like this

http://www.mydomain.com/l/freerol.aspx?AID=674&subid=Week+2+Freeroll&pid=120

Do you think Google recognizes this as paid link?  These links are follow links.   I am working on a site that has tons of these, but ranks fairly well.  They did lose some ranking over the past month or so, and I am wondering if it might be related to a recent iteration of Penguin.  These are very high PR inbound links and from a number of good domains, so I would not want to make a mistake and have client get affiliates to no follow if that is going to cause his rankings to drop more.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[FedeEinhorn]

Affiliate links are a kind of "paid links" as the affiliate gets a remuneration for placing the link there (indirect, but still).

They should be nofollow'ed, it could be a little late now as you can't force affiliates to change the links, but if you are placing them using javascript, it should be pretty easy (even injecting them with a js file should use the rel=nofollow attribute.

[xoffie]

Very good question, I am not sure how Google see's affiliate links but in my experience a site showcasing your product via an affiliate link has contibuted positively to DA. Be interesting to hear what the current word is on this?

[FedeEinhorn]

yeah, the thing is DA is a metric that WAS able to predict rankings, but not anymore since the introductions of penguin and panda.

You can research endless niches and you'll find that high DA or PR show up lower than sites with no PR or DA due to an algorithmic/manual penalty.

[Robertnweil1]

Thanks guys...I think if we take a strict interpretation of Google guidelines, we would no follow these links, but again they have lots of these and very solid rankings.  So, I am reluctant to no follow them (assuming we can) if they are helping as rankings are generally good and have tailed off in past 30 days or so a bit.

Any of you (or anybody else) have some real world experience with this?

Thanks!

[Everett]

Hello Robert,

So doing the right thing for the client aside (which would be to advise them to nofollow those links for their own long-term benefit), if they are still ranking very well it is doubtful that they have a site-wide "penalty" or "filter" like Penguin, Panda or any others. Most likely if traffic has dropped significantly, but not dramatically, you could be looking at a loss of pagerank (not the green bar PR, but the real stuff) due to Google blocking the flow of PR from those, or other, links.

If that is the case then nofollowing them would neither help nor hurt because they aren't being counted anyway, and the site isn't currently being filtered or penalized. However, it could help in the future if you nofollowed them because you never know when "not counting" a link could turn into "penalizing you for it". It could only be an update away...