affiliate links and affect on ranking

I have been reading every article I can find in order to learn more about SEO, but a big question has come up.

1- How much affect does having an affiliate link have on a website as far as PageRank or search rank?

2- If my PageRank will be effected negatively, should I use javascript or another type of link to hide my affiliate links from search engine crawlers?

Thanks for the help.

Mike

Affiliate links in themselves should not affect your rankings and certainly won't affect your pagerank. The only area you might have difficulty is if your site is solely built as an affiliate site you may have a hard time trying to get into human edited directories such as the ODP.

The big fuss about affiliate stuff is that many people churn out "site out of the box" sites which offer no unique content and degrade searchers user experience.

It's much easier to promote something interesting and original than something boring and the same as everything else. I use ton of affiliate links, but I also write tons of stuff which is not affiliate stuff.

With regards to pagerank and affiliate links, are your affiliate links coming into your site or going out of your site? If they are coming in, make sure that they link directly to your site such as www.sitename.com/asp.id=1234.html. Once thing to be careful of if you're using your incoming affiliate links to help boost your PR, be careful who you work with. You really only want to link with sites that are relevant to your site's content.
If you are discussing outgoing affiliate links, make sure that every outgoing link you have has a returning link to the PR is sent back to your site evenly.

Why only relevant content sites? Irrelevant links don't affect negatively your ranking and cont as much as irrelevant links to the PR. One of my affiliates send me 5 times more traffic/earnings than google, do I have to close his account just because his site is not 100% relevant? Amazon and eBay have tons of links on non relevant sites and they have a good PR, rank well on google and make a lot of money...

The link with variables will only give page rank to that page with the variable, not to the page without the variable.

so if an affiliate put a link: shophere.asp?affid=2334, shophere.asp won't get the pagerank; only shophere.asp?affid=2334 will.

If your internal linking is well done shophere.asp?affid=2334 will have a link to your homepage and other important pages, so the PR will be transfered to them.

This discussion is probably most suited in the seo page ranking section. But be that as it may, I still believe that if you are trying to optimize a site and get a high page rank, linking with and getting returning links from relevant sites is the best tactic for boosting your pagerank. There are many many varying opinions on the topic, so this is just my two cents. If you having affiliate traffic into a site, it probably is not being optimized aggressively by the site owner therefore the relevancy of the incoming links to that site is not as important as another site that does not have incoming affiliate traffic.