Is cloaking affiliate links needed for SEO?

by 11 replies
13
People all over internet cloaks their affiliate links so that they look nicer, (Like /recommend/theCBproduct/), and then block Googlebot from following the links that go through /recommend so that Google would not see that you are hosting affiliate links and therefor punish your site.

But is this needed? Dont you think that Google still will see that you are having affiliate links on your site? Is there any other reasons for cloaking?
#search engine optimization #affiliate #cloaking #links #needed #seo
  • I don't see any SEO benefits to cloaking outbound links. It is good to do, however. It makes your site look more professional in the readers eyes and it makes it very difficult for someone to hijack your affiliate link.

    For SEO, you should set these links up as "No-Follow" links.
    • [1] reply
    • Yep, I have the links as nofollow now, but I wonder if I should cloak them also, and put nofollow for the whole folder "recommends" in robots.txt instead.

      Anyhow, you do not see the link target site if you do not check the source or hover the link, so I wonder how many people really sees that there are affiliate links..
  • As far as I know google punished sites because they DO cloaking and not for affiliate links.

    Google doesn't like sites where the visitor actually does not know where he gets after clicking a link because it is cloaked. Therefore I think it's still better to not cloak links.

    In my personal experiences I never saw a difference between not cloaked and cloaked links on my sites...
    • [2] replies
    • nofollow has nothing to do with anything in this case.
      Complete nonsense as far as the use of nofollow.

      People have all sorts of strange ideas as to what nollow
      means or does. It does not mean "no see." It was created
      for one reason and that has nothing to do with putting links
      on your own site.

      Cloaking is neither good nor bad. Just don't stuff a page with
      several affiliate links and create some decent surrounding content
      and other on-page factors which are the main things.

      I have never heard any good argument for cloaking. Seems to be
      something someone made up to charge people for a perceived danger.

      Paul
      • [2] replies
    • This is not true at all. There is no "slap" from Google for having cloaked links.
  • Do you need to cloak? Depends on your affiliate network and how they display your ID in the URL. You can easily set up a bit.ly for links on your own site. Most people will never catch the fact that you are posting an affiliate link unless you say so.

    For the search engines, its usually best to set up the no follow to be safe.
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    Is cloaking affiliate links needed for SEO?

    People all over internet cloaks their affiliate links so that they look nicer, (Like /recommend/theCBproduct/), and then block Googlebot from following the links that go through /recommend so that Google would not see that you are hosting affiliate links and therefor punish your site. But is this needed? Dont you think that Google still will see that you are having affiliate links on your site? Is there any other reasons for cloaking?