While cloaking your affiliate links is absolutely necessary to protect your affiliate commission, what are the consequence for your website rankings?
While there is a lot of controversy around cloaking affiliate links, you need to know that this will not be an issue in other markets than Internet marketing and make money online.
In many niches, people don't know the difference between an affiliate link and a direct link. Some of them don't even know what is adsense.
Now, the question is: does cloaking your affiliate links (and add them on your website) penalize you in the search engines?
First, let's see why you would cloak your links, and after, we will answer to this question:
Affiliates cloak their affiliate links to prevent one of these situations:
They are afraid of link hijacking. Again, this will only happen in the “make money online” type niches, since people don't know what is an affiliate link.
The second reason is to prevent link bypassing. This one can happen in every single market, and it is a strong reason to cloak because even if people don't know it's an affiliate link, they may type the merchant's url directly in their address bar.
And your would lose your commission one the sale if they buy.
Another reason is for email marketing... It's not good to send an ugly link to your subscribers, and it has been proven that people tend to not click on these.
Now, let's talk about search engine optimization.
When you cloak your affiliate links and you add them to your websites, be sure that you add the “nofollow” link.
Why should you do this?
Because the search engines will not follow this link when you do this.
If the search engines find out that your site is an affiliate “pre-sell” type website, they won't see it as an authority, and hence, they may not rank you well.
So to be sure that your site is a “fat affiliate site”, be sure to add articles with valuable content for your visitors. Search engines will reward you for adding value to the Internet.
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