As a affiliate i use 301 Redirect with Godaddy.com to redirect my affiliate link though my domain. For search engines would you say this is the best way to get indexed by google and other search engines, or would you recommend sending the traffic through a blog 1st. On the blog i could have a link that then sends you to the affiliate website after they have read the article. Also do Blogs get indexed fast by Googles?
If you're doing an immediate redirect, don't count on much search traffic. Google won't rank site-that-redirects.com in terms of what destination-site.com is about.
If you have a regular wordpress blog that you host yourself, and you ping google blog search, I found that Google indexed my blog partially within hours.