Before I request hundreds of links for "nofollow" I want to verify I'm doing the right thing

[Patrick_G]

Happy Thanksgiving Mozers,

In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow".

I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google.

Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow.

Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.

[Kingof5]

Keep nofollowing your links everyone - eventually we'll break Google!

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi friend,

Here is my take on this..

I would tag all the affiliate links with the 'nofollow' attribute no matter what the consequences might be as in the long run it would place you in the good books of Google as its a good gesture as a webmaster.

Here is an article from SEL in this regard:

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-affiliate-links-we-handle-majority-of-them-125859

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi