Cloaking affiliate links

[leporello]

This is just leading on from a question I put in the Wordpress forum. I was wondering if there is a penalty (or risk of) for masking affiliate links. I'm not talking about links that are mysite.com/go/xpokersite, but a link on a page that uses a claoking plugin to hide the referral code.

Anyone any ideas/experience?

[cprpoker]

Penalized by who? The search engine or xpokersite. I tend to mask all my affiliate links. They are getting the better deal, so why pass them any juice? At least that is my theory!

[leporello]

The search engines of course.

[cprpoker]

The search engines of course.

I don't believe you would be penalized for masking an affiliate link. It is such a widespread practice for other reasons, like internal tracking of clicks.

[sarak]

Rather than risk it with cloaking why not just put them through a redirect that you don't allow the bots to follow by adding the directory of the redirect to your robots.txt

Disallow: /go/