Affiliate Marketing

I’ve read many articles and forum posts about WordPress plugins that can make your life as an affiliate marketer easier. Most of them are really useful but it’s possible that some of them can harm your Google PR and maybe even your SERP positions. What I mean?
I made an experiment with two of our WP blogs - Cooksites and Photoaccent installing Alinks. Last several months everything was fine from affiliate point of view (the blogs generated nice number of Amazon sales) and Google “Judged” strong PR2 for both blogs. But after the last Google PR update (from the previous week) the page rank was dicreased to N.A. for Photoaccent and to PR0 for Cooksites. The only two blogs of all our blogs with dicreased PR were exactly these two blogs where Alinks plugin was installed. Of course I need more time to analyse to make sure that that’s exactly the reason for the page rank loss. But having in mind the widely recently discussed rumour that Google announced unofficially “war” to websites that have a large number of paid links then there is some logic that using Alinks can affect your Google PR.

Edit: Please, note that I’m not against adding paid links on your blogs/websites at ALL! We’ve got many paid / affiliates links added on our websites and all of them have “nofollow” attribute added - don’t see any problem with Google in this case!

I would like to hear your comments.

Below is a list with several WordPress Plugins that we often use on many of our blogs:

Adsense-Deluxe

aLinks (deactivated for now)

Bad Behavior

Executable PHP widget

PHP Exec

Sidebar Widgets

SimplePie for Wordpress

Ultimate Tag Warrior

… many other plugins.