Recently I started an ad campaign and I instantly got a quality score of 1/10. So I spent some time masking all my affiliate links and created a new campaign with exactly the same keywords and now I have a high quality score.
Yup, google has been slapping sites with affiliate links lately. Doesn't matter though, because, just like you discovered, you can mask them or do a redirect. There will probably be more slaps against affiliate links etc in a near future. Just means we gotta find new ways around it
You can mask a affiliate link by purchasing a domain name (I use .info since they are cheap) and have that domain name re direct over to your affiliate link. That is a common way of masking that works
Yes on the main page using meta refresh redirect. My quality score went back up but now its gone back down to 1 again. I wish Google would make up its mind whether it likes the site or not.
Surely the best way is to have your own website which has a page for each of your affiliate products? If you sell Blue Widgets then have a website which includes a page on Blue Widgets.. then somewhere on that page have your affiliate link on. Adwords won't slap you for that if done correctly.
From talking to plenty of other people who have been banished out of existence by Google or at least reduced to nearly nothing, I have come to the conclusion that even if you are sending Adwords to your own page of affiliate links, the ad will be reviewed at some point by a human being who will determine you are not the actual company but a middle man affiliate. Google has been moving affiliates out of the picture in favor of the source company making and selling the products. In other words, Google wants to be the only middle man. Or at least that is the direction everything seems to be going.
Seems kind of silly if Google is trying to make money from adwords advertising. I'd think they could make more if they let all the affiliates bid themselves up to a dollar a click. On the other hand I can see where this might be beneficial to the consumer. I would be annoyed if I was shopping different kinds of Blue Widgets and after clicking on six Google Ads they all landed on the same product.