Affiliate Link Encryption, Redirect and SEO Question

I'm new to affiliate marketing and confused about the whole cloaking, redirect, encrypting thing with affiliate links as it pertains to SEO.

1. Is it better to have an affiliate link in JavaScript or HTML?

2. I have a choice to encrypt and hide tracking code. Should I do one or the other or both?

I was reading a paper from Google a while ago (shoot I really wish I could remember what it was called) - it was a "leak" I think that got published all over. But it mentioned CJ and their links and was talking about link cloaking or redirecting or something like that in instructions to their people on how to identify a fraudulent or spammy website. Granted, it made the point that if there is more content than there are ads, than it is likely not fraudulent or spammy or whatever word they used.
It's bookmarked somewhere on my computer...

Anyhow, I don't want my affiliate links to hurt my SEO and I'm definitely into white hat. Any words of wisdom on the best formats?

Also, well, never mind...I'll start a new thread for my next question! Thank you anyone who can help!!!

I wrote a program that does a 301 redirect to the affiliate landing page. In between the redirect, it stops off at a MySQL call, tracks the from & to URIs and then sends them on their merry way (to the affiliate site).

Now, my links look like this:

somesite.com/r/my-fav-keyword-affliate-program
somesite.com/r/my-other-fav-keyword-affiliate

my .htaccess redirects the stuff after somesite.com/r/ into a script that records the click, and prints a redirect header.

The reason I did this was:
1. Track my outbound clicks
2. control the traffic (by editing the database of redirects, I can drop an advertiser instantly but keep all the traffic to my link for a different advertiser on the same keyword).

If you need help writing this, let me know, it's pretty simple as long as you have a mysql database, but if you don't you can still do a 301 redirect without tracking just to keep the link under your control (by hardcoding the URI inside the guts of your script and redirecting as I did above.



most search engines don't like to follow site.com?foo=bar&frik=frak type of links. And most people don't like to see affiliate tracking information because they know it is a biased suggestion to click on the link. My technique above hides it from them so it looks like a link to your site.

By the way, this is the same way that people redirect traffic directly to affiliate links, and could be considered spam if you don't provide good content when the visitor is on your site (so while this technique is legal, don't abuse the redirect)



You could also use a javascript "document.write" from an external javascript, as that is hidden and does not hurt page rank. Basically you put the text you want hidden inside javascript that writes it to the page instead of renders it hard coded. On the page that is yours, use script src= and then link that to your .js file that has the document.write commands in it. By doing this, you hide the text you've written from most search engines, but it's still visible to humans.

Both of these techniques add a short delay (file handle connections for the js, and mysql/script calls on the server for redirects), but I feel they are worth it.

Let me know if you need some help implementing them.