Are links to our website through our affiliate program hurting our rankings?

[youngb55]

We have an affiliate program for an educational related course product and I am becoming worried that links to us on our affiliate's websites are hurting our site rankings. I have read that google is usually pretty good about picking up on affiliate links and not giving the follow links credit, but not sure if that is just for the big affiliate networks or if they can spot less obvious affiliate programs.

With this in mind, would you ask all affiliates to use the nofollow tag on all links coming in, or would you make sure that the links are more branded in nature?  There are a mix of text links along with banners and other display components. There would be editing that would need to be done to the core files of our affiliate/member software (aMember Pro) to make all links nofollow and we want to see if there are other recommendations before doing so.

We are trying to fight out way out of what we believe is an over-optimized anchor text penalty and are evaluating all areas that we can make improvements.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[mstoic]

I will check every website which links to me, then ask the people with bad/duplicate content to add a nofollow link.

[Everett]

If you can make those links nofollow by updating files within your affiliate software I'd opt for that route over asking affiliates to add a nofollow tag. If you can't update existing links that way you'll have to ask the affiliates to update them.

Don't rely on affiliates to add the nofollow tag for you going forward. Give it to them in the code they copy from the site.

I like to recommend sending all affiliate links through an external redirect first. For example, you might have www.YourAffiliateDomain.com/?afflink=123, which would then 302 redirect to the page they want to link to. This way if anything ever goes wrong you can kill off that domain and get rid of all of those incoming links in a flash. They'd also be going through a 302 prior to hitting your main site so no pagerank would be getting passed and you'd be in good graces with Google whether those links were nofollowed or not.

[youngb55]

Thanks for the suggestion Everett. I have the Wordpress plugin Pretty Link already installed so your solution would be really easy to set up and I plan on doing so.

Thanks!