Hi All,

I was recently affected by the Google Algo update which has made me look much closer at my site. In some recent communication I had with GPWA members it seems that the affiliate links that were visible on my site might have been negative and were all followed outgoing links... that has not all been changed to internal, nofollow and noindex links that all do a redirect from files hidden by my robots.txt file. Sorted.

...so thats all done but when I have been updating all my affiliate links and banner links it suddenly struck me that most of the banners on my site use hotlinked images hosted by the operators I am promoting. I have not read anywhere that Google slaps you for this but IMO it is an interesting thought.

Lets put it in another way; if I was Google would I prefer a site that uses content only hosted on its own servers or... content hosted on other peoples servers that is duplicate and being used elsewhere?

Does anyone have any experience of typical banner image hotlinks adversely affected sites?