Link cloaking in 2015\. Is it a bad idea now?

[TomNYC]

Hi everyone,

I run a travel-related website and work with various affiliate partners. We have thousands of pages of well-written and helpful content, and many of these pages link off to one of our affiliates for booking purposes.

Years ago I followed the prevailing wisdom and cloaked those links (bouncing them into a folder that was blocked in the robots.txt file, then redirecting them off to the affiliate). Basically, doing as Yoast has written: https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/

However, that seems kind of spammy and manipulative these days. Doesn't Google talk about not trying to manipulate links and redirect users? Could I just "nofollow" these links instead and drop the whole redirect charade? Could cloaking actually work against you?

Thoughts? Thanks.

[Dezzign]

Yes and anything to do with WordPress link cloaking and redirects the must have plug-in is 'Pretty Link Pro'. It provides super easy link management and handy analytics on every outbound link you create. I've been using it for years and it's great.

[Carson-Ward]

Yeah, so I always thought that Google hating on affiliate links was a myth. Then I had an affiliate site started losing rankings. They went back up when I nofollowed the links. That was years ago, but it's still my preferred solution.

I suspect Google is already smart enough to understand what's happening, but they avoid doing anything about it because it's not impacting rankings and some people use it for legitimate reasons. Maybe some site owners don't trust the site they're sending traffic to, and don't want them to know which content is working best. Maybe others have a poor method of tracking that involves redirect.

I'm familiar with Yoast's solution, but I don't think it's helpful. It might make it look like you have more internal links, but I sincerely doubt Google is going to reward you for that. I recommend nofollow in any case, and direct links unless you have some other reason to avoid them.

[Dezzign]

Interesting question. Yes, just adding the no follow attribute would be a much better solution, but it's not always optimal to have your full affiliate links exposed to everyone.

I would still run with the redirect linking process that you're using, provided that the mechanics of it are sound, and they work. But I would just make sure that all of the links are actually nofollow links. Linking out to sites in a bad neighbourhood is what will hurt your site's rankings. Provided that your affiliate sites aren't super spammy, and all of your outbound links are nofollow, you shouldn't have a problem.