Originally Posted by signupdamnit

It's highly unlikely in 2013 that an affiliate will get a linkcode indexed at the top of the Google results. It can still happen but it's very rare. What is much more likely is that the affiliate will get penalized by Google Panda or Penguin for having many dofollow sponsor links. It's possible the sponsor could get penalized for it too. I know of the opposite case outside of the industry where a sponsor was demanding that affiliates make the links nofollow because they were afraid of penalties.