As part of my link development i was wondering which Url is best to bulid links to, Affilliate link or domain re-direct forwording to domain? Hope i posted this in the right forum.
It won't do you a lot of good in the SERPs to build links to duplicate affiliate content even if you redirect to it. What I like to do with affiliate sites is put it on its own domain or subdomain. Then I put all my unique content on another domain. I build links to my "unique content" site to get it listed in the SERPs. Then I put nofollow links to the affiliate site from my "unique content" site. Basically this keeps me from wasting time building links to an affiliate site that won't ever rank in Google...and keeps my unique content away from a bunch of duplicate content.
Ofcourse google notices the duplicate content. Having unique content is the most important thing in fact - "the importantest"
Isn't freelistfool advocating having some duplicate content? He says that you should set up separate domains and subdomains that have duplicate content, but concentrate on the page with the original content. Nofollow means google and some others don't count it as a "vote" for pagerank.
OP, do you mean buying a domain just to forward it to an affiliate program? That would be a waste of money IMHO.
You can check the source code surrounding the link. It will say something along the lines of 'rel=NoFollow'
There are several extensions to firefox that can do it. In general, most places that would be "easy" places to put links (comments on PR pages, etc) are nofollow.