I run an affiliate site with thousands of affiliate links to merchant sites. I am begining to wonder how this will affect by page rank. I heard the “nofollow” tag embeded within my links could help matters. Any truth to this?
Sometimes Nofollow count as backlinks for google, but in seo terms you wont have any benefit.
Does having thousands of links to affiliate products have any adverse effect on page ranking? Thats actually what I was trying to ask.
Outgoing links from your page has no affect on the Page Rank of that page. It does affect the Page Rank of the pages you link to as the PR your page passes is divided by the total number of links on your page and that fraction is then passed via each link not marked as nofollow.
The PR of your page is only affected by links to your page.
Google do recommend using nofollow along side paid links, however many believe over use of it can raise search engine alarm bells. There is no concrete proof of this, there are stories of sites both increasing and decreasing in PageRank after optimising outbound links.
just try it. If the PR of your site was down. You can remove those links.
I think it does have an effect, based on my own experience. I had a blog with a PR3 where I used affiliate links frequently. The PR suddenly changed to PR1. My posts contained maybe one or two links. I did not add the nofollow attribute. Now, I consistently add it and my PR has seemed more stable.
Nope, it doesn’t. Despite your blog PR dropping from a 3 to a 1 it really has nothing to do with the number of outbound links. Felgall is right:
If you don’t believe him, check out the definition of PageRank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
There is a thing called Page Rank sculpting, where for links on your site, you set the no follow attribute for some of the links. Yes, you can do that, but Google doesn’t recommend it, so we don’t recommend it.
Nofollow links never harm your site but they have no benefits because google boot did not crawl these links which have nofollow.
PR sculpting also known as ‘siloing’ hasn’t worked for over 18 months. About the only positive you thing you could have said for siloing was that if Google nerfed PR sculpting then it either was having an effect on ranking or so many people were doing it it was starting to negatively impact on Google’s ability to properly crawl sites. I’d vote for the latter.