How to Hide Clickbank Hoplinks from Google?

You are being paranoid. Putting a clickbank link is not going to hurt your seo. But what you can use to make your link look nicer is a wordpress plugin called pretty link (the free version is good enough). It will setup your redirects, even add "no follow" to the link and give tracking info. So check it out.

I use affiliate links on my sites APPROPRIATELY and haven't even considered it an issue. In my opinin what Google cares is that your page delivers quality content to the searcher. So many sites rank well with reviews or relavent content followed by an affiliate link.

Let me know how it goes.

Clickbank's new hoplink system hides your userid and give you a encrypted hoplink so It should be ok to use it.

As the wise have often observed, correlation isn't causation.

I don't see how adding a few affiliate-links to sites is going to hurt. Even the world's largest, well-ranking authority sites are well-monetised through means additional to (and sometimes to the exclusion of) AdSense.

I've never had any problems with this, myself.

But in any case, you could set up a redirection script on your site, or buy a new domain for this purpose. This will make it less obvious to visitors that what they're clicking on is in fact an affiliate-link (for those who have any idea what the heck an affiliate-link is ), but it won't stop Google being able to establish this if it really had any interest in doing so.

I always use redirects/masking, anyway, but just for my own convenience (easier to change the target if you're using a redirect) and a cleaner user-experience, not because of any SEO considerations.

There's also the benefit that by using your own masked URL, that's what the visitor/prospect is more likely to bookmark and thus return through at a later date, rather than heading directly to the vendor's site. This re-implants your affiliate cookie and increases the likelihood of you being credited with your deserved commissions.

I tried to shorten a clickbank link using Google's service: go.gl and the shortrned link would not work and said it was spam. If Google's own shortening service is classifying it as spam, is it a logical assumption that Google will think I'm linking to spam? Perhaps Im paranoid too?!

Google deindexed one of my websites because I had an affiliate offer on the front page in the first 150 words or so. They also suspended my Adwords account. I don't think there are any automatic penalties for having one, though.

mmastrengthandconditioning dot info is the site in question. Originally, I had a paragraph promoting the affiliate offer at the top. They deindexed me, so I took off the offer and applied for reconsideration with a particularly nasty letter. They let me back on, but it's still ridiculous.

The affiliate website was the one offered under "Want Superior Conditioning?" in the resources box. I just moved it over there so it was more out of sight.

The site has literally not changed at all aside from the removal of a ~150 word paragraph at the top with the offer.

It doesn't actually matter, because it's much better to mask hoplinks anyway, for several other reasons.

Bit.ly and goo.gl and tinyurl and things like this are the worst way to do so, for all the reasons explained here.

There are ways to do this on your own hosting, "prettylink" and so on. Or you can just use a $1 .info domain-name and redirect it from the registrar to your hoplink, with masking (which is what I've always done).

Subdomains will also work. I use a combination of .infos and subs, personally. I agree with Alexa @ no bit.ly or anything like that. It looks horrible and unprofessional.

Forget about it. They will eventually suspend your campaign!