Can Affiliate Banners Incur an SEO Penalty

[accelerator]

Tweet

Does anyone think that by using affiliate banners you can incur an SEO penalty? All my text links are masked by a redirect script. If I start using banners can I get identified as an affiliate and penalised?

Thanks for any insight.

Rgds

[getvisible]

"a penalty" is a harsh word and often associated with 30+ penalties for dodgy behaviour. Google wouldn't penalise, per se, affiliate sites - but its open to debate.

I just think its good business practise to put affiliate links in external redirects which are robots.txt'd out for the main reason is you can count clicks in addition to the data networks give.

[mercurythread]

No reason why affilate banners should incur a penalty. However I always try to remember to set banners as nofollow links. Generally the links go to pages on the network site which 302 redirect to the merchant site. I hate linking to these pages as the value of the link gets lost somewhere.
The best way I've found to do it is to have banners pulling the image from the network site and then set the link up as an internal redirect handler - with the redirect file being listed within the robots.txt file. Just incase. Also dont want some network to change to 301 redirects and I start powering merchant sites (cant have that).