Bloggers.. Hide affiliate links or not?
 

I have been placing the links in my .htaccess file and creating links like http:myblog.com/get-sex-now . It allows for a faster change in links for the entire site if a sponsor goes belly up. One link change affects all links.

Does google want to see the actual link or would it look at the affiliate code hiding as a negative and punish the site?

Any thoughts?

a php file with a redirection...

I just rel="nofollow" my affiliate links

+1









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301 Redirect affiliate links using wordpress seo plugin and give them a dedicated parent page that you can restrict bots from accessing using robots.txt

explain that please

I just place my aff links, don't hide them... I believe as long as you don't put too much aff links in your posts and your content is unique / good... you should be fine

read that google is tanking sites that hide affiliate links.

at the absolute very least, nofollow them :2 cents:

if you are my competitor please hide your affiliate links.

where did you read that, idiot ?

from my testing. not theory idiot.

FUCK you and your testing shit for brains :2 cents:

haven't tested it but wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link/ out since march 6 2012 so should work with wp 3.3.1

To those arguing about cloaking and G:

"The original version of affiliate link cloaking involved hiding your links from Google and other search engines. This was based on the theory that Google would penalize web sites which used affiliate links. What Google actually says is that they don’t want to see affiliate links without substantial content included together with it.
Regular product websites and blogs are fine, but if I were to set up a page which showed just the affiliate link with some very light content however, or worse, scraped content, then it would not do well in the SERPs.

Because of this issue, many people started to cloak their affiliate links by giving the Google bot one version of a link and human visitors another version. The thing is, Google’s engineers aren’t stupid and they learned how to detect this. It is this kind of link cloaking which they specifically frown upon and which will get you sandboxed or de-indexed."

So if I use a link to a directory (site name) with 301 redirect to the affiliate link inside the directory, is it bad or not??

thank you. i discovered the same from my testing but this just confirms my theory based from experience.

Sorry for the delay in replying...

Create a wordpress page eg. link - www.your---blog.com/link/

Then create a new page for your affiliate link, with the wordpress seo plugin and use the 301 redirect feature with the above 'link' page as the parent page eg. www.your---blog.com/link/affiliate-site/

Then add "Disallow: /link/" to your robots.txt