Anyone bother cloaking aff links from google?

A

Avalanche

New member
Jun 27, 2006
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Every now & then I read about Google's slant against thin affiliate sites and wonder if I should be cloaking my links better. I use a combination of methods via scripts some of you probably use as well (301s, double meta refreshes, etc), but they all deliver the links up right off the bat. Might shield me from the merchant or network sniffing out my traffic sources, but the bots can still follow those.

I heard someone suggest on sites where I'm getting organic traffic, to serve up links direct to the merchant, then rewrite them once the page loads using javascript. Think he's just paranoid, or should I be strongly considering this?
 


just change your robot.txt to not allow the spiders to follow the link u have 301 redirecting to the affiliate link
 
No followed link to a folder on your site blocked by robots.txt, 301 redir to the aff link.
 
I keep aff links in database, keep PHP file which retrieves links from Db in folder which I blocked in robots.txt. Each link is than only retrieved when requested. So link to offer looks like item.php?id=234. Anyway I still no follow them. Don't know if this make any sense but looks like it's working for me. I've seen sites doing well in Google without any masking so maybe it is site's quality after all not the fact that it's an aff site?
 
Are you guys seriously having problems with your affiliate links on small niche sites? I mean to the point where your rankings are actually suffering?

The only time I use DMR is when im doing something shady and want to hide my traffic source from the network...

Other than that, the only way I handle my links is with a simple redirect on a page on my site....eg.. www.mydomain.com/goto/link1 ---> affiliate link

I have never had any problems with ranking issues...or Google easily banning me??
To be honest i never really thought this was such a big issue!
 
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