It seems many people now hide their affiliate links using javascript, cgi redirects or html redirects. How many of you do that? Have you noticed any improvement in conversions or search engine rankings? Also, how many of you use rel="nofollow" tag for affiliate links? Does it have any SEO value in practice?
I cloak my affiliate links, and it does seem to convert better as a result. I was shocked myself, as I didn't think the average Joe buyer would care about affiliates, much less know about them to recognize the link as an affiliate link etc. But yep, from my own personal experience, it does seem to matter after all.
the rel="nofollow" is within the anchor tag as such: <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example</a> HTML:
I just started to do this as an experiment. No change really. Google might like them better though......
I sometimes hide them but i have never done a comparison to tell if it works or not. Anyone have some stats on increased clicks/conversions?
The only reason I hide links is to track them properly. I track all my affiliate links so I can manage the marketing of all of them accordingly. That's about the only reason....
Same here. PHP redirect. The only thing I found was changing the directory from /go/ to something more relevant helped a little.