What is the danger of integrating different affiliate program widgets far under our core content?

[lcourse]

We have pages with lots of unique content that are ranking very well in google.
I am now considering to add towards the end of the pages widgets from the booking.com affiliate program and also from the affiliate program of two other accommodtion sites.

These affilliate widgets would be placed far beyond our core content in the bottom 15% of the page. Each widget will contain a large number of links to the different accomodation options that booking.com or others offer.

In our context this information would be indeed very useful for our visitors.

1. Shall I be concerned that our google rankings may suffer due to google perceiving our site as less quality (or google misinterpreting our intent to generate traffic to affiliate programs) ?
2. If google rankings would be suffering, is this something we would normally see in a week (most of our pages are crawled daily by google)  and then recover in a week when we would remove the widgets or would this generally be something that would affect the ranking over the course of a month or more?
3. Shall I be concerned abou link dillution since my pages would now have a lot of links pointing to the affiliate sites, which could devalue my internal links?

Any thoughts?

[EGOL]

A thought about blocking competitors...  Most people who land on your website are not going to purchase anything.  If your conversion rate is 2% then 98% of the visits are not made by buyers.  If you have a lot of content pages on your site that receive good traffic then your conversion rate (sitewide) is probably a lot lower.

Your competitors might be bidding good money to have their ads appear on your site.  So, it might be a profitable idea to allow the ads and take a piece of your competitors' ad budgets - even if you might lose a few sales.  When you make money from ads you don't have to do any work, but when you make money from sales you must do work - not only filling orders but also supporting customers in their use of the product.

We allow many competitors ads to appear on our site, especially those who because of prices or services are not real competitors.  The only exception might be those who are extreme in their price discounting or on websites that are selling consumables and have a very high rate of repeat ordering.

At times we might be running low on stock or have employees out.  At those times we might become very aggressive with ads, inserting them high on the page or above the header.  These options are built into our design.

[lcourse]

Thanks EGOL. Interesting. 
Same goes for me. Performance of affiliate programs mostly was very disappointing in the past. In this case it is a complentary service which could add real user value and I do not want to risk losing visitors via adsense to competing services and filtering out competitors  in adsense would just be too time consuming.

[EGOL]

I don't have any formal testing to back these observations.  These are simply what I have noticed by experimenting with affiliate programs for twenty years.

**  I believe that google strongly dislikes "thin affiliate" websites.  These are sites that are monetized by affiliate links but that have very little real content or low value content.  I believe that they are subjected to a "quality filter" that is more strict than the "Panda" algorithm.

**  If you link to affiliate websites, expect those links to drive the affiliate site higher in the organic SERPs.  So, if you are competing in the organic against the affiliate program site, you will empower them at your own expense.

**  I have used Adsense on all of my websites since the first week that Adsense was available.  I've learned how much money different ad positions on the page can produce with Adsense, then I have compared that to what affiliate ads produce in the same position.  Adsense almost always make more money - not a little more money, a lot more money.

**  I have also compared the amount of money that I can make using affiliate links to the amount of money that I can make by stocking the product and filling the orders myself.  I make a lot more money filling the orders myself.  There is no comparison.

**  What I have not tested is how much can be earned by using hypertext affiliate links within the paragraphs of my content.  In those locations, I am using links to sales pages on my own website or to articles on my site that are relevant to the links.  I am confident that the sales links to products that I sell and fulfill myself will make a lot more money.  I think that links to my own article content are valuable, but if they are more valuable than a small commission, I can't answer - but I'd rather keep the visitor on my own website.

[lcourse]

Thanks Egol, good point. 
Did you ever experience problems in google due to too many affiliate links? If so, how long did it take to recover in google rankings?

[EGOL]

I agree with James... but if you place all of these links at the bottom of the page you will not make much money.

Also, consider who persists to the bottom of your articles.  They are your very best visitors and your potential evangelists and linkerati.  Instead of blowing them off to an affiliate site, recommend more of your content to them.

And... when your affiliate links are higher up on the page your less interested visitors or your highly distractible visitors will use them and you will make money as they leave - probably a LOT more money.

All of my best producing ads are high on the page and the bottom of my page is where I recommend more content.  I learned not to sell my most valuable visitors.