Do I need to nofollow PKR flash banner?

[Unknown Webmaster]

Do I have to add some kind of nofollow to the PKR banner on this page:

Unknown Webmaster - PKR flash banner example page

I'v never used flash banners before, and the lack of the friendly <a> tag is confuuuuusing!

[sipka]

Hm, I can't see any banner on that page, but in case of flash banners the url is coded into the flash file itself (and it is a compiled file format - hence search engines cannot read the content of a flash file - that's why full flash sites are not good (though if they are done with XML, database, etc, there is a workaround).
In another case the flash file gets the parameters from usually a Javascript file (the URL too).
In both cases the search engines cannot read what is in the file itself, so you don't need (and apparently can't even) to make them nofollow

/Imagine a flash file like a picture, for Search Engines pictures are a big black hole, and without giving them "alt" and "title" they don't know what is on the picture - the same applies to flash files./

****Edited: now i see the banner.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Thanks a lot - one thing less to worry about

[Michael Martinez]

In both cases the search engines cannot read what is in the file itself, so you don't need (and apparently can't even) to make them nofollow

The Macromedia SWF format has been published to search engines for several years. All the major search engines can now crawl and index content in Flash files, although they don't extract all the data (yet).

I don't know why anyone would want to nofollow an affiliate link. It's not going to hurt the page.

[Nat Arem]

For sure, Google does crawl flash. But it's unclear what sort of weight they give to links and it's also unclear if there's any negative drawback to linking out in flash.

I don't think there's a problem with it from an SEO standpoint, but I know that personally don't like flash banners because I can't track outgoing clicks for them. For that reason, I won't add them to a website unless it's a flat ad deal and I don't care as much about click tracking. It has nothing to do with the links in them and a theoretically possible slight link juice drain (a theory which I don't even really subscribe to -- I believe that sites need some high quality and relevant out-going links to rank highly for competitive keywords).

[Unknown Webmaster]

I'v always been nofollow'ing afiliate linke because...

Well, there was a sticky on CAP about it To ALL affiliates...VERY important!!!
and I saw one of the really savvy poker SEO guys doing it (nofollow on the pages that are redirecting to the rooms), so I assumed that this was the way you were supposed to do thing..

I don't know why anyone would want to nofollow an affiliate link. It's not going to hurt the page.

[kingcobra]

I agree with Michael and it's not even a text link, banner links don't really distribute juice and flash sure as hell doesn't. If it were your home page and it was text links and you don't have to do follow them then doing this may not be a bad idea and it's just a matter of adding it to the html of the link, rel=nofollow. Like I said Randy Ray if you're reading this, I do know html when it comes to links which has practical value unlike some other things like hand coding By the way Randy once posted that every webmaster must be able to hand code their pages and that started an old fashioned Texas wrassling contest between us and I haven't missed a chance for a cheap shot since Actually all my site building is done by hand if your hand on a mouse counts

[Michael Martinez]

Maybe if there are a lot of affiliate links on a page, Nofollowing them would help a little -- but only if you link out to something. Affiliate pages have been given special treatment for years by link-counting search engines. The rule of thumb is, the more advertising links you have on a page, the less likely any links on the page are to be valuable or worthwhile.

I've seen all sorts of speculative theory about search engines and advertising links but generally speaking the search engines just say they don't like pages that are loaded with advertising content and little else.

If you're creating lots of content and just embedding ads here and there, I don't think there is much need for blocking the links. I would be more concerned about tripping an affiliate farm filter than about passing PageRank and/or anchor text to a merchant site.

[kingcobra]

That's very interesting Michael and that's been my understanding as well. Good thing because at least in my case this would be a hell of a lot of work as my site builder doesn't allow you to edit the code and I'd have to do it at the file level by hand, link by link, every page, and edit it again each time I change a page, and this doesn't sound like a hell of a lot of fun

With that all being said, it's the home page I worry about the most and I only have 1 aff link there. Still though I might worry if I had a lot of them as Michael is saying just because no one is positive about this, and as is the case with just about all SEO, we're just making educated guesses here The nofollow can't hurt though if you did it.

In your case it's a flash banner and aff link both and I wouldn't worry about that at all. Banner links in general aren't worth worrying about here alhough if you have a bunch of text links even if they are all affiliate links you might want to consider nofolowing them.