Do I need to make my affilate links no follow?

You don't NEED to but I always do.

I don't like giving away my hard earned PR

Hi - I would only reserve my link juice for my own personal websites - otherwise you're hard work is really only to build some other dudes long term business

Hey guys thanks for the fast replies. By the looks of it so far you are all agreeing that they should be no-follow This may sound stupid, but will the affiliate links stay valid when I start messing around with them? I am especially worried with the banners I serve for them.

I'm sure Matt Cutt's did a webmaster video about this recently and said while they do a good job at automatically recognizing most affiliate links and ignoring them they still prefer webmasters to nofollow them.

Interesting that they collect/are aware of that data ^^

Hey guys. May I ask how you make links in your wordpress site nofollow?

How would this work with banners or isn't it necessary to make banners "no follow"?

Hi Mike thanks for the link buddy I appreciate it. First of all I had a good laugh watching this video as Matt Cutts is actually talking about "paid links" as if they were very normal in his eyes while we all know how much effort they put into indentifying them and punishing websites for making use of them. How double is that? Or did I completely misunderstood him?

So basically he is saying that you can rest assured as google and other bots "probably"can identify these banners as being affilate links, but then again he mentions that the banners could use a no follow tag nevertheless just to be sure. He is basically saying most likely you dont need to but sometimes you do need to. Thing is, am I going to get a straight answer from the brands I represent when I ask this question? It's not in their best interest to tell me if I do need to. Sigh. I am going to have to think about this for a bit.

"Google could care less about many affiliates to begin with.
Affiliate links, if the have something like ?= at
the end, are basically giving links to the main website."

Paul, I dont care what google thinks, but what I do care for is knowing if I am providing the brands I represent a free lunch SEO wise and PR wise. Leaking PR isn't fun when you have worked your butt off to gain rankings in an extremely competitive environment. Not to mention giving them higher rankings because of the alt texts used in the banners ( I still dont know the answer to that one), So in this case I need to know where I stand. So I am leaking juice to them as you state above if I understand you correctly.

"Your index page/main page of your website might have
PR3, but the internal pages would all be different in
most cases. So, if the link is on a PR n/a page, it
does not matter about PR. Web pages have PR, not
websites."

Every page on nearly all my websites have the same PR ( some small exceptions) Whats the difference anways. webpage, website, potato potato. But in this case it does matter as all the links on all pages are in fact leaking link juice and maybe I am also boosting their rankings for free while I am at it. Thats no fun.. Can you understand why I am worried now that I know that many use no follow to make sure this doesn't happen?. I am trying to run a business here.

"I don't get the mentality. You people think affiliate links
are bad, but then want google to love what you
are doing. That's working against yourself. If affiliates
are so bad, then ditch them like a bad habit. If they
butter your bread, then give the finger to google."

You people? I am an affiliate myself and I am not a self hater by all means. I love being an affiliate and therefore I NEED those affi links on my site to provide me income actually, and it is my bread and butter. Just trying to learn the best practice here and find out what is the best method to cover my behind.

"It's stuff like this that makes google keep tweaking
their algos.

I dont see no reason for google to change their algorithm just because I want to let them know I want to keep my rankings intact and not lose PR unnecessarily.