Links coming IN from a link farm

[LukePickering]

I'm about to launch an affilate marketing scheme where users get a unique ID and are rewarded for referring traffic to my site which results in sales.

The idea is that it'll just be people putting banners on their websites or predetermined text links, but obviously it's going to be in their interests to post their tracking links in lots of places and there's a benefit to me as the link is like www.mydomain.com/?ref=THEIR_ID so I'll pick up backlinks too.

My question is, if an affiliate puts their tracking link into a link farm or other spamming system, is my own page rank going to suffer? To be clear, I'm NOT going to be linking back to these people, they'll only be linking in to my site.

I've set up some T&C's which they'll need to agree to and which state that they can't do this, but obviously it just takes one and the damage is already done...

Anyone know what the effect could be?

[AussieWebmaster]

you can't be held accountable for bad inbound links - but if spammed with your link could have problems

[AccuraCast]

So long as such spam links don't account for the majority of your link volume, you're fine.

Google most likely considers something called "spam mass", which in simple terms is akin to calculating the percentage of your inbound links that come from spam-type domains.

Sites with a high link spam mass would find it more difficult to rank higher on SERPs for competitive keywords.

[mooreseo]

In this instance, the worst thing that can happen is that the links don't count for anything, but it shouldn't "hurt" you or get you penalized...