[websiteideas]

Should you redirect cj links to avoid PR loss or can you simply use the rel="nofollow" to preserve your Google page rank?

[glittered]

Good question, I was thinking of making a redirect script to hide the affiliate links.
I currently use rel="nofollow" target="_blank" onmouseover="self.status='More details'; return true" onmouseout="self.status=' '; return true">

I have no idea if PR is effected but I try to put as many ideas into place that I think may help as I can.

It would be good to hear what others say...

[bethany]

Been thinking about this myself as I started a few new sites recently, and some of them are ranking unexpectedly well in Google. Each site uses a link cloaking method, either cgi or php.

Some of these cloaked links are listed on Google as supplementals, which looks weird, but doesn't seem to hurt my rankings.

While part of me thinks I should disallow the links via the robots file so they won't "pass on" PR, I'm beginning to think these cloaked links could actually be helping, as most of these sites avoided the sandbox completely.

Curious deal, as the common opinion at Webmasterworld would suggest to disallow, but then, I don't want to mess with the results I'm seeing. Maybe on my next couple sites, I'll disallow the link directories via robots and compare the results.

I would advise using cloaking in all cases, if only to hide your links from prying eyes. The disallowing (or nofollowing)...not so sure about.

[webworker]

The PR of a page comes from the pages linking to it. A page's PR doesn't decrease by linking out from it.

What is affected by the number of links on a page (regardless of where they go to) is how much PR is routed to other pages within the person's own site. That's figured by the number of links on the page, whether or not credit is given to the pages they've linked to.

[wwalter]

Interesting that you bring this up. I was just discussing this with our SEO guru couple of days ago. He's under the impression that it's definitely a good idea to use the nofollow directive in the rel attribute for affiliate links. He actually talked about the possibility click behavior supplanting backlinks in future upgrade of the SEs. I posted his comments from our affiliate newsletters in this thread:

http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=72890

[suzigeek]

I've had a few sites come out strong right away with Google recently only to peter off a month or so later. It seems to be a pattern.

Sites that I've launched in the past that did well w/Google right off had more staying power.

The sites that I recently launched all use the "rel="nofollow" target="_blank" onmouseover="self.status='More details'; return true" onmouseout="self.status=' '; return true">" bit also.

[Rhia7]

CJ has a method to encrypt links, but it seems as if the advice in this thread is to do more: not to encrypt but to cloak?

[glittered]

this thread motivated me to build an in house link redirect script (customized from a script I found) which I have completed for one website and will implement into my others. Wasn't that hard to do, I used ASP but a PHP one would be easy enough to do & there are plenty of resources out there for them. I would recommend to others to do the same which should solve any problems mentioned in this thread. I guess it would also make my sites spyware secure as well.

[Woz]

PR is like Love, you don't lose it when you give it away, there is just more of it. As Webworker says, outbound links do affect internal PR transference, but I would advise against PR hoarding, more trouble than it's worth.

And no need for a Link Condom, won't do anything constructive, and redirects won't affect PR transference as Google follows redirects, even with a condom.

Short version, worry about things that are important, and PR leakage is not something about which you need to be worried.