For the href I sometimes take them out, not always. For casinos I promote sometimes I use all the html provided to link to their site. Another way is if the affiliate provides a gif image I will copy paste the image then as link will enter the http with my aff tag.
Why do this? in a sense its a little deceptive because some bots won’t pick it up as a link. The less outgoing links the more optimized your site is. Html allows for this. Its a little complicated, but if you read up on what the html href= is for you come to realize this piece of code is sometimes harmful.
Also an example of what not to do. I made this mistake and leanrt from it. I have one page with the extention /what_is_online_poker.html my link popularity for this page is zero. The PR for the page is 3.
I speculate that my url extension has stop words in it, such as, a, what ect…
I beleive stop words like I found on your site like “to” could pontentially damage your link popularity.
Most of these ideas I derived from intense study of Google, MSN, and Yahoo straight from the horses mouth.
I am mostly confused, these are the only answers I can come up with to explain why my site ranks high cosidering I went live I June 2005. My keywords for example, on going bonuses is in the the top ten on google out of 6 million pages. But this is happenning for all my keywords I used Microgaming Bonuses top ten on Google. The list goes on. Its all confusing to me.
But don’t be discouraged but taking the time to learn a few things for yourself goes a long way. Good luck buddy and remember my site has errors too! greek39