I am under the impression that it does violate google tos, not only that others have made this clear also, amazon, clickbank, etc... Google clearly states that no type of cloaking is white hat... In this case, I think he is talking about content deception... Example: 1: mydomain.com/go/this-is-my-product Visitor sees affiliate link on final destination.... (nothing more then short url redirect...) 2: mydomain.com/go/this-is-my-product I enable cloak option, visitor does not see affiliate link, so you are hiding the actual affiliate link from the visitor.... (In other words, this is a cloaked link) When I see these terms of no cloaking allowed, are they talking about example #2, or do they refer to something completely different?
Wow, in wordpress I use the Pretty Link Plugin that cloaks my affiliate links (and gives hit counts) and uses my own custom domain URL as a no-follow link. So I guess I am doing the same. I believe that since I'm saying no-follow this link that's leaving my site I am not giving Google one type of content and my user another. I'm essentially giving Google nothing telling them not to follow my link and giving my user a link to check out the product that they are reading about. LOL sure makes you scratch your head
if you are using affiliate link on your article the use nofollow so that google will ignore that url to maintain your search ranking