Following a conversation with an Internet newbie who was trying to convince me that removing an affiliate link had helped his PR go up, I just wanted to confirm that affiliate links won’t hurt your PR, but rather might contribute to improve it, if they’re related to the content of your site. Employment-related affiliates might therefore benefit from linking to an established site such as Employment911.
While this obsession with PR has somewhat turned into nonsense for lots of webmasters focusing on their PR rather than on the content of their sites, what will hurt your PR is actually inbound links from “bad neighborhoods”, rather than outbound links.