Do clickbank links lower your Google/search engine rank?

There's no definite answer, sorry to say. There's too many coincidences to know anything in SEO outside of controlled studies.

There is a possibility that an affiliate link will decrease your rankings if your site substantially lacks unique content, there are plenty examples of this. However, there are sites like about.com which have plenty of affiliate links who's pages rank extremely well. It's really hard to pinpoint the cause and effect. It could be site Trust, it could be anything... who really knows.

You could of course make up your own speculation and sell an ebook about it.

I like your discussion.Thank you very much.

Having a lot of affiliate out going links to commercial and ecommerce websites (Like amazon) would hurt your rankings.That's why ezine articles no longer allow affiliate links in your articles.

I have heard different theories about this and have never gotten a straight answer. You can always hide your affiliate links in a redirect and then it will not look like an affiliate link. I always use the following redirect method and make it a no follow link as well.

- Create a folder (ie go, order, product name, etc)
- Use the following redirect and save it as index.php inside that same folder.
- Upload that folder to your hosting account
Your link will now look like yourdomain.com/go or whatever you named the folder

In my experience they definitely help. I just created a new product in ClickBank, Relaxing Meditation, at RelaxingMeditation.org. I was following a plan from a workshop of local IM pros in my area. The idea was NOT to use SEO, but to use affiliates to get traffic and sales.

I bombed out on the affiliates/traffic idea - just couldn't get any interest going from potential affiliates I contacted.

Anyway, I worked on some other projects for a couple of weeks, then decided to try SEO on the site. Before I did any work on that, I checked the results position for the keyword 'relaxing meditation' to get a baseline.

I was totally surprised to find the site at #12 for that keyword. At that time, the SEO on the site was terrible. It had very low density for the main keyword and very poor use of SEO techniques on images, links, etc.

The only thing going for the site was the domain name (exact match with keyword) and the incoming links from ClickBank affiliates who publish the entire CB database on their web sites.

Since then, I have done the on-site SEO right and seen it move up to #7 in the results. I intend to build a link wheel to move it up even higher so I can capture more traffic.

*** Oops - I missed the point that you were talking about outgoing links. My whole post is about incoming links. I have heard other people swear that incoming links from CB are worthless. Can't prove that by me.

If you are worried about it, then use a PHP redirect such as 'camm' suggests. But use a robots.txt file to block the spiders from spidering your folder with the redirects in in it. I can't give you the exact details on how to do it, as I forget right now. But it is easy to find it by doing a search of If you are worried about it, then use a PHP redirect such as 'camm' suggests. But use a robots.txt file to block the spiders from spidering your folder with the redirects in it. I can't give you the exact details on how to do it, as I forget right now. But it is easy to find it by doing a search of Google.