I like to hear your opinion about this: I have a website with only (unique, my own, not copied) information about certain topics and products. My site ranks well for my targeted keywords and I am satisfied with the traffic. Also my PR ranking is steady for the last 4 years. I also use Adwords because I use affiliate links to 'sell' products from others, which works pretty well. My total traffic is about 60% organic and 40% Adwords. When I send a potential customer to a affiliate product I use a redirect URL (metarefresh) but in such way that in the HTML link-tag I use the rel="no follow" tag and in the metatag of that page I use the NoFollow, NoIndex tag. My question is, will Google see this URL as a redirect or not (because it is not following the URL, which I don't want). I also use some affiliate redirects in my .htaccess file, which results in a 301 redirect. But using this type of redirect is, I think, also not allowed according to the 'clean' Webmasters Guidelines rolleyes.gif The reason I use these redirects is that I hate those long '&' and '?' and long numbers URLs. What is your opinion about this?
You aren't supposed to redirect to avoid having query requests in your domain (the ? & stuff). You just use mod_rewrite and htaccess. 301 redirects are good for search engines. They tell the engine that the change is permanent. I suppose it's unethical to use it for redirecting affiliate links, but.. other than ethical issues, it's unlikely to pose a problem.
I wondered the exact samething as Kakakamal was asked. Does anyone knows the real answer based on real life experienced? Thanks
redirecting to affiliate URL with 302 is fine.. as you anyways do not want to pass PR... This can also ensure your original url can rank...
My advice. Take a desired domain Forward it to your Clickbank hoplink and start advertising with Adwords. You will get cheaper clicks, because you will be as a publisher, also there won't be any problems with display url.