Are you still cloaking your affiliate links?

I don't personally...

I never cloak affiliate links.

What I do is create a single custom sales page on my site, then rank a lot of internal pages for relevant keywords, this way I only have a single page (custom sales page) that has the affiliate link.

I point links from my ranked internal pages at the custom sales page (think Adsense text type Ads of my own).

Link/traffic flow:

Lots of big websites do what yukon has described ^^. I don't cloak aff links either.

I don't believe in masked links being a problem at all. Ethically it's an ok practice and Google would be wrong to target it.

I believe that all the hype and suspicion is misguided. Masking links is OK. Shortening links is ok.

I've masked on my sites and still will mask sometimes and I do not have problems. So why are yall acting crazy?

Here's how it really works. If you have a website with the majority of OBL(outbound links) pointing to a well known affiliate program like ClickBank or Amazon then this will cause your website to be flagged as a potential thin affiliate website. If you mask, spiders will still determine the end location. It does not matter about the aesthetic nature of the link url and google does not take the stance that if you do not display a full affiliate link you are being deceptive and that is wrong... That's some stuff that people made up on here. (but there is an American law that says that if link points to a place that earns you money the full link must be disclosed, but it's a dumb law and noone honors it, not even Google. I ran a search on google to try and find it for you guys but could not)

What google does not like is to see that most of the OBL of a website are all pointing to amazon or clickbank.

It's because of this people start cloaking... not masking... cloaking is where you determine if the visitor is a spider or human and send the spider to a non-afffiliate site and the human onto the affiliate site.

There we see the difference between link masking and link cloaking (which is short for destination cloaking) make itself clear, but 90% of the conversion on the forums do not recognize this distinction properly.

^^ a lot of people use those two terms interchangeably, though you're right - they're not the same thing. It doesn't really matter though as far as this thread goes.

Actually, it's the fake gurus who came up with the concept that regular visitors somehow care about unmasked affiliate links and would rather click on a masked link. It's one of the easiest products/ideas to build/sell.

Now just out of pure curiosity, what evidence do you have to show that Google doesn't care about masked links (vs. full-disclosure-links)? This stuff is very easy to determine programmatically... your argument is that they don't care, because it's "stupid"?

....cause a masked aff link is a pretty strong signal (== this affiliate is hiding stuff) in my books... no?

My point is who cares about opinions... when it's all quite simple really. lol

And good call Nik0 - I had completely forgotten about that doc. They just published a new one, it's got a bit more infos in it.

great responses!

My evidence comes from my own test sites. I've never received a complaint and there is no site I own that will not / does not rank.

I currently only have two EMD amazon sites that used masked links when promoting the targeted products and both sites are hooked up to webmaster tools and analytics. I've never had any messages or incidents.

My vocal point is the uniforming out bound links is a practice that people should expect to see these days. When they see a /go/ type link in context of some sort of promotional statement they should understand that it will most likely take them offsite and is used for traffic measurement purposes. Twitter uniforms all their outbound links through a redirect script and so does pinterest and so does facebook.

Link masking helps provide a gateway for link tracking and Google understands this and that's why they are not aggressive against it.

It's a shortsighted view to think that people mask links solely to hide a destination. And the evidence provided by my own experience and the lack of complaints from my customer base's suggests that it's a non issue and usually deindexing and/or never being indexed is related to the OBL issue I suggested in the other post(which has landed my sites in the sandbox) or a number of other factors.

How I combat the sandbox is to tie a blog to my money site that contains posts linking out to related websites to dilute the OBL potency of links pointing to Amazon. The EMD helps a lot too. But without an exposure plan a thin affiliate site may never ever rank well or rank shortly just to become deindexed.

So the take away from my experience as someone on the forefront of the industry is that the link masking worry is an over hyped one. Experience (or lack of negative experience) shows me it's an accepted and tolerated practice and theory tells me that that is so because there is no conclusive evil thing about it and Google is forced to be lenient on it.

It can be used to measure traffic, shorten links, and yes, hide protect the destination or protect dissecting of the destination url. The short list of pros and cons are pretty balanced. The ability to use masked links to track traffic is very valuable.

I even speculate that having masked links would not even get the site flagged for a manual review because number of flags would become too incredible for their workforce to address.

But if your site can't pass a manual review should it be there? The point of an affiliate marketer is to seize opportunity to convert traffic into sales in a way that is not being done yet. Google will respect a good looking affiliate site if they believe it will help make the internet economy more money.

I also use masked links for the affiliates programs I promote, it is doing a simple redirection, but it is important for me because I don't have to find the affiliate link everytime I want to use it, I just have to remember the name and write it after my site's url..
When you say google this google that, well that is just speculation, nobody knows what google is doing and honestly why should we care, it is its job to adapt to us and not us having to know what it likes or not.
It's like the nofollow/dofollow, this was really bad, I never liked it, comes a search engine telling webmaster what they should add to their link? No way!

If you don't respect yourself, then google will crush you, you give them a finger they'll take your arm!

Great info sharing there Yukon. Thanks.