That title may be a little dramatic but is it really?  PR is something you should try to keep on site and you do not want to be giving it away or unknowingly create page rank bleed.

Page rank bleed is when you let page rank bleed through your links to other sites.  This can be a good thing if that is what you want.

Now you have to ask are you knowingly giving page rank away?  If you are giving it away then how will you keep yours up?  It is best to reserve that page rank for your own pages and internal linking.

If you are linking to your merchant without a no follow tag then you are not only giving them a sale buy you are also giving them some ‘juice’ or page rank.

The only relationship you have between your merchant and you is you provide an affiliate sale and in return they give you the commission. You are not required as part of the deal to provide anything else. In a few cases the affiliate program TOS may require you to leave the affiliate link unaltered if it is a cut and paste link.

I have seen numerous times affiliates giving away hard earned page rank then having the merchant surpass them and end up in the top 5 spots of Google and guess what? Not only have their sales dried up but the merchant has decent page rank surpassing just about all their affiliates that were promoting them.

So get your page rank bandaids out and start patching those holes.