Long affiliate links are ugly and changing the links every time a program decides to alter their link structure is a b*tch. I guess a handy way of getting around both problems would be to redirect users to the affiliate links either via redirect page or .htaccess. Any thoughts on how search engines (Google) reacts to redirects like these and what way of redirecting would be best?
.htaccess works really well. That way if any certain affiliate link needs to changed you can do it by editing just one file. You could also use the .htaccess in conjunction with your robots.txt. For example use "yourdomain/information/yourlink" as your url for the affiliate site. Place a link, such as cellphones.php where it says "yourlink". Redirect cellphones.php to your affiliate link and add a disallow to the robots.txt for subfolder "information" (of course the subfolder doesnt need to actually exist).
Remember, you don't really care about sending link juice to the merchant, so whether search engines follow the link or not isn't important. Both good suggestions above. www.example.com/merchant-name/ looks way more clickable than www.merchant-name.com?affiliateid=653w436&prod_id=35637 Smart merchants will craft discreet looking Affiliate links, or base the affiliate ID off the referrer data so a plain link can be used (and get the search engine benefit of the link).
OK here is a little more detailed explanation of the process. For this example I will make up some urls. I will be omitting one of the "t" in http so the links will not become clickable here. Suppose you want to promote an affiliate program that sells blue widgets. >You affiliate url is htp://www.someaffiliate.com?sub3446 >You want to create a link that looks like htp://www.yourdomain.com/products/bluewidget.html Open your .htaccess file and type in Redirect /products/bluewidget.html htp://www.someaffiliate.com?sub3446 This needs to be on one line (if it wraps it's OK just dont use the carriage return). Also the spaces are important. Now when someone goes to the url htp://www.yourdomain/products/bluewidget.html they will automatically be redirected to the url you specified in the .htaccess. It is recomended that you use "htp://www.yourdomain/products/bluewidget.html" target="_blank" so that this opens in a new window. You may now use the url htp://www.yourdomain/products/bluewidget.html in your site to send visitors to the affiliate site. Your robots.txt should look like this: # PARTIAL access (All Spiders) User-agent: * Disallow: /products/ This tells the bots to ignore links that lead to files within the products directory/sub-folder. Note that this subfolder does not need to exist for this to work. The robots.txt is just a simple text file. You can create it with an editor like notepad or create it within your control panel. Now you have it setup so that you can use a simple friendly looking url to direct traffic to your affiliate link while blocking search engine spiders from crawling to the affiliate site. You can add as many of these to your .htaccess as you need to. If an affiliate program expires or for some reason you no longer want to promote it you can change the redirect url to something else with one edit instead of having to go through your pages making changes. You aren't limited to just your site for these redirects. You can use the url you created in forums, articles, blogs, or where ever you need. I should mention that some affiliate programs do not allow redirects so it is best if you check just to be on the safe side. Any questions?