Optimizing Free Sites

[Halfdeck]

However, from a search engines point of view... Do you think they would approve of this tactic or consider it a way of manipulating pagerank?

Matt Cutts, the head of Google's spam team, has no problem with "sculpting PageRank" internally:

http://groups.google.com/group/Googl...b12da30e8b0de2

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the
ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity.

[Halfdeck]

Here's another snippet about aff links: if you ask a Googler, he/she'll tell you they are easy as hell to detect and discount:

we've spent most of our time talking about paying money for
text links or paid posts, because Google does a pretty good job of
detecting and handling things like affiliate links or banner ads.