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You are 100% right. That's it. The concern is having 100's of thousands of links that would be very very low quality links. The affiliate link pattern will make it "sort of okay" if you decide to keep them follow. Those links are there for the affiliate tracking, but typically the majority of the web uses some sort of an affiliate tracking site like GAN (Which is closing down), CJ, Linkshare etc. Considering that, is it really worth the risk of having that many number of links ? Maybe, maybe not. And that's the business decision you need to make.

The affiliate traffic and sales is important (which justifies the affiliate program). Your natural SEO rankings (current and future rankability) helps you justify the importance of these kinds of decisions and which is why you are asking this question.

We just need to find the right balance without tripping too much on either side.

Well, technically you could. But to me it would be more important to optimize these pages to rank, rather then use the strength to link to other pages.

So it's your choice ;). I would rather milk the cow here....

Keep in mind that these pages are probably already linking to your other pages as well via the common header, footer and other navigation links.

Domain Authority / Pagerank is what Google looks to see how deep and how frequently Google will crawl a particular website. They also typically look into how frequently the content is being updated.

Think about it from Google's perspective. Why should they index that website, 2500 pages every day. What's changing ? Does the site have enough domain authority to warrant that kind of indexing ?

In my opinion, this is not a concern. Just submit XML Sitemaps and see what percentage of your submitted pages are indexed.

Is it a natural link ? It really depends how you are getting it and what the context of the link is. Let's say you designed a professor or a departments' website hosted on a .edu, yes, it makes sense to have a Designed by link. If the professor has a list of web design resources and mentions your website, that's also a great link. But if it's a comment link or on a forum or something else...that would probably mean there are a lot of other unrelated links as well and therefore not a good link.

I hope this helps Shashank.

Let's say for a second that you are able to manipulate this one ranking signal. Keep in mind there are well over 200 ranking signals. What would one do for the other factors ? There's too many items to manipulate. And if you have naturally been able to achieve 140 of those signals, would you really want to risk all your good and hard work and try to manipulate it ? I wouldn't.

I hope this helps.

I agree. They look damn scary. You can tell by looking at the list, they look like directory sort of links. Yes, definitely not a good idea...might might work really really short term but will haunt long term.

Provide some examples of how Google sent the un-natural links warning to hundreds of thousands of website owners. Link building / Off-page is always a bit tricky and the best bet is to build great content and if one out of 10 pieces of excellent, well researched, well written content ends up being loved, you get a ton of good quality, natural links, that money can't buy and your competition won't be able to achieve...easily.

I agree with Ian 100%. It does not make sense (Even though that pingback link is nofollowed). Does it help your user ? Would it be useful to have that link available to them ?  Think about the user experience and in most cases, we get the correct answer, which is almost certain to be white hat way of handling the situation :).

Great answer Ian.

Ud, I strongly suggest you look into the latest Search Engine algorithm updates and read more about the Penguin and Panda updates. Thin, unrelated links can and will hurt you. I would instead suggest spending that money and other budgets in building and strengthening your content.

You might also want to read this article at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

It's not possible to use that information alone and say for sure that those reasons are connected. They very well may be, or absolutely not.

The links could be a variety of reasons. What if they acquired another big company and did a 301 from the old to the new. Could be the tool you used for the backlinks data crawled more. It could be organic links. It could be something that went viral. There are too many things that could happen. So without digging into the details, I can't say anything for sure.

Look at fresh web links and see what you see there. If you are concerned about that competitor, download their backlinks from OSE and audit them.

Honestly, I would stay away from buying links unless you are ina really really black hat, super competitive niche like Online Casino, Gambling, Rx, Adult etc etc.

Those guys are clearly selling links with PR. Huge Red Flag. Stay away.

I would suggest building content with that budget, content that helps your user find what they are looking for. Content that they would link to and so on instead of spending your money on junk links.

Do they have great content ? Do people like the content ? Do actual users share or interact with your content ? Is it ideation of your e-commerce products ? Or is it more like information about your products ? Does it add value to your customer ? How much content do you have on your microsites ? Are they same/similar topics ?

It depends case to case, but you could indeed consider doing what you are thinking based on the answers above. Just make sure it adds value.

Also, have you ever received a penalty or unnatural links warning ?

Craig

That's a great example and I agree with you, you are on the right track. Think about your competition. They would also have the similar kinds of links. So you have those low quality, but natural links should be totally okay. With the nature of the web, nobody can control who links to them. Think what kinds of links Google, Yahoo or Amazon or Microsoft might be getting all day long.

I would only concentrate on the actual links that are problem, should out manipulation, clearly blog posts, guest posts, reviews which were done from crappier sites, spam blogs.

I hope this helps.

Donnie, I think I agree, however shouldn't then this be also the case for Thumbs Up. Why did you like it or what specifically you liked ? But I guess you are essentially taking about transparency as in Facebook Likes (who did Thumbs Up and Who did the Thumbs Down). I think it's an interesting thought, but I am not sure where this could/would go if that was to happen.

Think about this - I have had some answers where I posted and got 1 thumbs up and 2 thumbs down. That tells me something is wrong. Maybe I am wrong. If you think about it, SEO is not an exact science....so everybody has inputs, they could both be right or they could both be wrong. So coming back to the "Thumbs Up" vs "Thumbs Down", do I want to know who did not like it ? Maybe...but it might be better if I don't. Coz if I do, then maybe it becomes personal. Knowing who liked it or not, might be good, but might bring negative energy into the community which is never productive in my opinion.

That's why there a Like button, but no "DisLike" button. Let me know what you think @Donnie.

I would run a test. A/B test both the situations. See what the difference it. This varies so much by who you are up against, today and your competition could change on a day to day basis. So run this test every few days/weeks.

Run a small campaign to bid for position #1 for x amount of time.

Another campaign to bid for position 2-3 for the same x amount of time.

The cost vs conversions, ROI calculation will tell you what's better for you. If the numbers make sense to stay at #1 and you can afford to do that, why not ?

Wordpress is like any other CMS. The same problem of SPAM exists with Google's Blogspot. Spam is everywhere and I don't think the Search engines are trying to use "What CMS are you using" to decide if you are SPAM.

I would not worry about getting penalized "Just because you decided to use Wordpress as a CMS/Blogging platform".

There are tons and tons of great, high authority, ranking websites made with all kinds of CMS platforms including Wordpress. So, I would say there's no merit to this.

Google's Matt Cutt's own blog is Wordpress Powered if that helps

Domain Authority is definitely going to matter here, but honestly not that much. Your strength is that you can work a lot more for your local area / niche and can have a lot more local links compared to the national sites. I would find out ways to get links from local businesses, non profits and other communities and organizations.

I would also suggest looking into doing some sorts of small events / meetups for potential clients to come and ask questions. You could also organize some activities / contests for kids.

I would also look at opportunities to work with specific real estate communities and sponsor some of their events with gifts. You could also setup a photo booth there for people to take pictures and then provide them a digital or paper copy of their picture towards the end of the day (Print them at a local Walgreens and have somebody pick them up or if it's cost effective to have a decent quality photo printer that can handle volume). The photo op could have your URL / Brand in the background in a creative way along with the year and name of the event.

Again, I think the intent is to think of this as a Brand Building Technique. Links, Mentions and Citations will come along with them.

Do you have an Image Sitemap created and submitted in your webmaster console ? If not, I would suggest you do that. Other then that, if I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about this being an issue at the moment. Google is smart enough to understand this as a CDN situation. As I said above, doing an Images XML sitemap should be all you need to do in this regard. I hope this helps.

Robert, I have actually seen that in Chrome for several weeks. Try it for other domains and you'll see the same thing.
Try Yahoo.com  Bing.com slickdeals.net amazon.com ebay.com orientaltrading.com and so on.

You might also want to try the Crawl Test tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
This tool crawls up-to 3000 pages for any website and I think for PRO you are allowed 2 crawls every day.

P.S. At the time of writing this reply, I see my crawls from yesterday and day before are still pending, so there might be something going on with the Roger bot.

You can also consider using Xenu's Link Sleuth, which can then crawl a website and provide you a list of any/all external links. This tool will essentially provide a complete list of outbound links from a website, not just from one page.