Important question on affiliate links

[DanDeceuster]

The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window.

This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page."

Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit.

My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, I read about this somewhere previously and Google has a policy of no PPC for what it considers Bridge Pages:

From: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company

Had a bit of a dig and this was the post I read a while back, sure of it:

http://www.curtsnow.com/googles-bridge-page-policy-dont-ask-dont-tell/

Hope that helps buddy. 
Marcus

[DanDeceuster]

Yeah I hear that, in spite of the site owner thinking the affiliate links were hidden from Google so that they didn't look like affiliate links, we still got the shaft anyway.

My question then is in the post-panda world, since Google recognizes us as an affiliate site, are we getting hurt organically for that? Should we nofollow the links? Change them from javascript?

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Here's my opinion;

Google's spiders will have more difficulty interpreting and following affiliate links using the onclick="window.open... method, but that doesn't mean that they can't. To my knowledge they can follow these links and even pass juice between them. Although I'm not sure that it would affect your rankings and so whether changing the links would do anything; after all, they're outbound links. If you were to nofollow them, then you would still loose the same amount of link juice, it just wouldn't flow to the trading sites.

On a separate note, as you know; Google's problem seems to be that you're acting as a 'middle man' from the sites who are actually selling the treadmills. From the odd story I've heard, unless your site is bringing something 'unique' to the equation then they don't like to have it promoted in their advertising space, they prefer to have the actual seller paying for the advertising. One way I've heard to get around this is to have a PPC specific landing page that concentrates purely on the review side of things, however I'm not sure whether your site would be flagged by them now or not.