Outgoing affiliate links and link juice

[Ventura]

I have some affiliate websites which have loads of outgoing affiliate links. I've discussed this with a SEO friend and talked about the effect of the link juice going out to the affiliate sites. To minimize this I've put "no follows" on the affiliate links but my friend says that even if you have no follow Google still then diminishes the amount of juice that goes to internal pages, for example if the page has 10 links, 9 are affiliate with no follow - Google will only give 10% of the juice to the 1 internal page.

Does anyone know if this is the case? and whether there are any good techniques to keep as much link juice on the site as possible without transferring to affiliate links?

Appreciate any thoughts on this!

Cheers

[danbocain]

Your friend is right. If there are 10 links on a page, and 9 are marked nofollow, that 1 followed link is getting less juice than a page that has only 1 link on it.  The division happens regardless to whether it is nofollow or followed.  I believe I remember reading this on SearchEngineLand, or it may have actually been a Matt Cutts video.  If I can find a reference to cite, I'll edit my post/add another comment.

[Ventura]

Thanks Dan, do you know any way around this? so that the affiliate links don't diminish the link juice on internal links?

[danbocain]

Not that I can think of directly, there are lots of creative methods that I've seen used (but I can't vouch that they work.) I personally wouldn't worry about passing a little juice off to an affiliate site, unless you are talking about several (or dozens, or hundreds) outbound links on the same page.

[SEO-Doctor]

Just do internal redirects on your affiliate links  e.g. yoursite/go/affsite  redirect to aff site.

You then block the /go/ folder in robots.txt

Hope that helps!!

[Ventura]

Thanks Dan, yeah unfortunately for some of my sites there are dozens of links that have to be there.

[Ventura]

Thanks Gareth, I will give that a go.

Just had a thought... redirecting it on my own site with a no follow in the robots.txt , wouldn't that still have the same effect as a nofollow on the actual outgoing aff link? that  the 9 redirected links would still only give 10% to the 1 internal link?