volatilegx - 1:43 am on May 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

These are pretty good questions. Keep in mind that the project you are contemplating is thoroughly black-hat. Having said that, let's rub our dirty hands together and get down to business.

After I create a throwaway domain and design pages for it for the search engines...

You've already got the most important concept down pat. Put your cloaked pages on a "throwaway domain". If they are penalized, you don't want the domain(s) you are actually promoting to share in any penalties.

...how should I link them to my main domain, or should I even do that?

You don't link them.... in the sense of hyperlinks (HTML links). What you do is have your cloaking program display the html you want to show to the search engine spiders -- to the spiders; and display your sales page to human visitors. If that sales page is located on some other domain, that is no problem. Your cloaking program should make a HTTP request for that page and display it under the original cloaked URL. Note that I haven't mentioned anything about a redirect -- no redirects are used in this process.

If you link to another site will the site at the end of the link be banned too?

It's not impossible or inconceivable, but I consider it highly unlikely (and I've never heard of it happening). Think about what would happen if Google and other major search engines made a practice of this. I could get all my competitors banned by setting up cloaked web pages and funnelling human traffic to them. There is no way for the search engines to differentiate between this and what you are doing, so the practice would have serious unintended consequences of which I guarantee the "spam police" are aware.

Or will the person who turned you in inform your affiliate partners so they will ban you too?

That is always a possibility. You might want to keep a layer of insulation between your cloaked pages and the actual affiliate site. What I mean by this is have your sales page hosted on a domain that you own and control. I believe doing this will reduce this risk.