Affiliate link on every page of site or?

Should I put an affiliates link on every page of my site. Are there any pagerank issues here or would google see this as spam? Would it be better to put up a "consolidation" page linking to the affiliate site and all my pages linking to the one page only? The reason I am asking is that I have found what I cosider to be a great match but they want to go with a link on each page...any thoughts

I have tried the "consolidation page" idea... and my income went down.... and I tried several different formats of consolidation page. This makes the visitor do one more click between being enticed and closing the sale - and that reduces your conversion rate. I have decided that direct links to the affiliate site with wise use of anchor text can actually help my rankings.

Thanks EGOL.......... so what you are saying is that for instance if I have a link to the affiliate site on say 100 of my pages but vary the anchor text that would be OK? I just worry about all those links going to one site and how google would see it...............I can see what you mean by not favouring a consolidation page..............

One more thing.....How can it help your rankings by having multiple links to the one site?

On my pages the link text matches the keyword that my page is SEOed for. IMO, google sees this as a relevant link to another relevant site.... and it increases the relevance of my page, thus boosting my ranking. IMO this can override the PR lost through the link.

IMO this strategy is great for low PR pages without very many opportunities to include relevant link text. I am not doing this on PR7 pages!

I agree with EGOL. I have tried his strategy on some affiliate sites of mine and I kept some other websites with a different strategy. What EGOL suggested got me a better return in affiliate sales numbers. It's giving me good holiday cash to spend

Another advantage of lots of links to your affiliate program is... with some programs, if you are the affiliate putting the most power into the homepage of the program site the URL with your tracking code will replace the root URL in many of the search engines. You can own a lot of SERP real estate this way.

It all sounds good but i need to get this straight....It's Ok to put up say 100 links to the one affiliate site. Google wont see this as spam. It is not natural linking is it. When we talk about linking stategies most SEO's say this type of linking is dangerouse. IE: This is really a sitewide link.

I have thousands of pages with links to the same affiliate program. I have these in ssi files so that I can change them easily and give other programs a chance to produce. The affiliate sites climb and drop in the SERPs depending upon if I am linking to them or giving another program a chance to produce. If you have that much juice to send to them they might even give you sweeter commissions.

I have had a similar experience. Centralizing the link to an affiliate site tends to diminish sales momentum.

I have thousands of pages, each with a link to the affiliate site. So far (with the exception of this most recent dip in traffic) this has worked well.

Egol, you had suggested 'wise use' of anchor text for affiliate links...

1) Do you use different text for each page's link to the same affiliate? By anchor text, are you refering to the text which appears in the link (or the title text - on mouseover)?

2) What is the current concensus regarding use of the Title element in an anchor tag?

I would rather keep my anchor text the same, but offer a varying title element.

Thanks,
-Dino

I try to the match the anchor text to the SEO of the page.

I don't know how much the TITLE element helps. Has anyone done any tests on this or has anyone seen good reports?

Egol,
In another post here Dazlindonna said that she thought sites with affiliate links had suffered in the latest G* update. What's your take?
raz