Yes, you can link to them. It's not like you would be linking to them on a daily basis. As far as I know Google loves it when you link to relevant sites (outgoing links are valuable too). And what's better than competitors in terms of relevancy. And if they notice that you are linking to them, you could be making good connections with them and who knows, they might do the same. Everyone wins in long term.

Are they all thin content? If not, then I don't think it's necessary to NOINDEX them. If you think some of them don't have any real value, you could specifically NOINDEX them(and not all together). Google will crawl those pages no matter how deep they are, as long as they are accessible.

4 months since I posted this and look at the situation right now. It's even worse. Basically they have done completely the opposite of what they promised.

I am not surprised at all.

No it doesn't matter. If it's an Exact Match, Search Engines still see it as one, with or without the dash.

Thanks for the detailed answer Ryan.

That was very helpful.

best,

Thanks for the reply Ryan. So it is all about user experience and it doesn't cause any technical issues with ranking mechanism? When you say "rest will work out", do you mean, if the user experience is better, it improves user interaction and page-time (helps with bounce rate too) and this all leads to better ranking?

No he simply says "bid on those brand name keywords".

Thanks for the answer.

Now that you mention the disallowing via robots.txt, I have done that after a little bit of research on google's webmaster pages and some other sites.

After considering all the answers and my research, it looks like, the best is to keep the list with fewer links and more content just like the review pages.

Thanks for the reply

Yes the reviews are all unique and they receive great feedback from users. I don't worry about the review pages as most of them rank in top 20 and even top 10 in SERPs.

My question was all technical and related to that specific page, which is the top 20 page I am talking about. There is no manipulation involved but it is a LIST that ALSO gives the user an option to directly visit the product page (through affiliate links) or read the rest of the whole review first (which the top 20 list page only displays a small amount of the review).

If so you need to understand each link you add detracts from the overall link value of your page.

So basically, after all you are saying the list page won't be able to rank better with so many links in it? If that's the case, I will remove the product page (affiliate) links from the list and leave only the links that go to the product reviews (internal links).

Hi,

Let's say you have great reviews for 50 products and some of these products do have affiliate links on review pages.

And then you have user scores and you come up with a top 20 product list sorted by user scores.

Now if you have the list of  top 20 products on one page and all these products have an affiliate link (with nofollow relation and a 301 redirect) on the same page with only a couple of images and a summary of the review linked to the review pages, would this still be considered as what Google calls a "bridge page"?

Would it be better to still generate the top 20 list but rather link to review pages only? (to avoid too many affiliate links on one single page).

No he simply says "bid on those brand name keywords".

I can help by giving you an example and its actual results.

I hope this helps.

On our site, for a certain word, just like in your case, the page is named let's say www.example.com/real-examples

When you search for "real examples" it is in top 10 but if you search for "real example" then it is not even in top 50.

I still don't think on-page adjustments decide the rankings on themselves as there are more factors involved.

Anyway, I hope this helps you a bit.

No it doesn't matter. If it's an Exact Match, Search Engines still see it as one, with or without the dash.