Best SEO practice for Affiliate Links
 

Hey guys,

I always wondered cause I saw it being handled differently by many sites:

What's the best SEO way to handle affiliate links. Just post them raw? Cloak them via redirect (xx.com/recommends/affiliate)? With or without nofollow? Decoded or coded?

What's your experience?

For years I used JavaScript redirects that checked for cookies and split of the parameter&value of their query string. Not effective today.

Probably, (maybe), the ratio of real content and affiliate links is more important. Google will not index roadside ad signs on the Internet information highway anymore the way I see it.

Interesting topic. I mix and I usually cloak and that works fine.

How do you handle it now?

Cloaked nofollow or dofollow? With a Plugin?

nofollow + nice urls is enough, google know all types of redirection even if you do this in flash or js.

^^ this
not sure about the nofollow. Google will follow just not bleed 'link juice' to the nofollow links. If affiliate links count against you, nofollow really won't help.

Google don't like paid links, and think your affiliate link is a paid! In some reason your affiliation link can be casino, viagra or scam site - nofollow don't give juice from your site.

And for the very end end :)

In you use Wordpress, install this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/pretty-link/ and thank me later :D

Nice! :)

Has this any additional function to Easy Affiliate Links (can't post link... don't have 30 posts) which I'm using. Any other cloaking mechanism? Seems to be the same.

Cloaking only works on site visitors not for SEO. Install the addon LiveHTTPHeaders to Firefox and check out the browser headers sent -- googlebot (on other bots) see those -- you are just fooling yourself.