Exchanging Links with your Affiliate Company

Ok here is a perplexing question. What would the impact be of linking between an affiliate company and its affiliates. Such as a link exchange or a one way link. I am sure it would be have the same way the rest do. But does anyone have any experience with this?? The reason I was interested, was the fact that two sites with content that is closely similar (in that affiliate company provided content to affiliate). Would there be cause for penalty here?

If it seem like a viable option I will see if I can come up with some good reasons to convince an affiliate company to do so. I have seen this on several cases and haven't noticed any bad effects of doing this, but there are a lot of factors involved.

I am blasting a ****load of pagerank into those guys and I'd like to get a little back. If they give me a link back it will help my rankings and enable me to sell more of their product. Linking back to affiliates is a win-win.

Let us know how you make out Phoenix.

I have expored this option a couple times with programs I manage. What I have run into is that most top affiliates do not want their link on the merchant site. They are very protective of how they get their top rankings and don't want other affiliates to see or potentially copy their ideas. But yet I agree with the PR advantages and the "giving back". Maybe I will try offering it on a couple of my programs and see what happens.

If you offer it then you have done your part.... and the affiliate can decide if the linkback is wanted. I'd like the link on my partner page, which will only be seen by visitors who enter the affilite site through one of my links. And that is the page that I am hitting with tons of pagerank.

Your could always simply not give them the PageRank boost... I did this one a little affiliate experiment I have going. All my affiliate links go through a PHP script called "bounce.php", with the URL as a parameter, like so: http://domain.com/bounce.php?u=www.destination.com

The script does a HTTP redirect to the correct place, but my robots.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /bounce.php

I don't care for the JavaScript style links, so that's why I did it that way...

- Shawn

EGOL, good points, but I am approaching it from a different angle. I don't want my link to have anything to do with the affiliate page or linking page that visitors will eventually end up at. In my linking strategy this isn't really going to benefit me in the long run, and will only temporary give me some pagerank of back. What happens if the page changes? goes down? offer or product stops being offered? I want to obtain links on my partners site that is their main website, even if it means being stuck on a link page. Because here I know that while I may not be getting all my pagerank back, there is a good probability that this page will remain unchanged through the course of my business with the company and maybe stay up after I am gone. Link pages are like little archives sometimes. They are often forgotten about, but their page rank still grows if getting linked from the homepage.
Now the advantage I have with some of the companies I work with is that I have a higher pagerank than them, and I rank better as well or on a similar level as them. So when I recently approached a particular company they were pretty interested in the idea. But at the same time they didn't fully understand why I wanted to trade links, and needed to make sure it wouldn't conflict with any of there other affiliates. Which is probably will not cause they are not going to ask them all if they want links too, take up way too much valuable time. Plus I asked first too.

I would keep them out of my linking partners, and by linking to them without your affiliate code you may be loosing sales
/BP