wait a few weeks for a manual review then boom... slapped.

at least cloak your links.

Sure your sneaking by now, but just wait. It'll happen and then you'll realize Google really isnt that fond of affiliate offers.

actually nowadays Adword did not allow people to use affiliate link on the actual targeted url. But it's not a big problems to most of the internet marketeer. you can use sub domain then redict to the affiliate link.
That will solve the problem

I have affiliate links on my landing page also, and nothing yet. And it's been several weeks now.

We'll see.

What about direct linking? Is that still ok to do?

This is the key sentence:

Affiliates who provide limited value by being a bridge page with the intent of solely driving traffic to another site or who are framing an affiliate site

In other words, sites like nichenews'. Direct linking is good, in fact, pretty much your only option.

So if I was nichenews or darkblue, I'd be worried and I'd do something about it. This slapping started sometime in July and seems to have intensified lately so obviously, it's not something they can do overnight.

I think what Google says makes sense - they don't want to encourage almost zero-value affiliate-ridden pages.

That didn't mean that i dont want to make money via affiliate marketing, so i decided to take matter in my own hands and created a Wordpress plugin that solved everything of a concern to affiliate marketer (my signature, and it's free full featured download - enjoy).
Basically instead of using different bits and pieces of software for cloaking - i created a single piece that takes care of redirection, cloaking, link shortening, tracking and even immunity from 'slap'.

Gleb

> Not sure how you can say your product offers immunity from the slap.

I was thinking the same. I'm no web expert but I do know a little and seems to me there's two ways to "cloak" a link. One is to redirect your affiliate link to another of your pages which immediately redirects it to your affiliate. I think Google's software can be made smart enough to see through that rather easily.

The other way I can think of is that the link runs a PHP program which reads a database which handles the redirecting to the affiliate. You could have unlimited affiliate links this way hiding in a database file. It might be more difficult at this time for Google's software to figure out that's what you're doing, but it seems not impossible to overcome eventually. I think your HTML code would raise some flags as it would be unusual to do this. That's probably what Gleb is doing.