I am thinking of hiding affiliate links by linking to my site eg. site.com/page.html and then redirecting to the affiliate link. Is that bad for seo? Will those links count as backlinks in googles eyes?
yes, it is a standard to cloak all affiliate links on the page to TRY to prevent search engines to discover your page's affiliate marketing focus
It makes no difference... just put a nofollow tag on your affiliate links. This tells the search engines not to count them. I have ZERO ranking impact from linking to a variety of programs and I have been Affiliate Marketing for more than a decade now. I change my links frequently and it does not affect my ranking. What is much more important is that you check to make sure that after you redirect the affiliate cookie is not stripped out. Clickbank is pretty good about stripping cookies on redirects.
Thanks for the nofollow tip. What about putting links on external pages, eg. blog posts, that go to my site and then redirect to affiliate link?