calicochris - 12:03 am on Aug 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'm looking for the simplest way to hide my affiliate account numbers in the various affiliate links. Not for users, but for search engines, scrapers and bots. The users know that they're going to be redirected from the copy on the page.

This is the first site that I am building with affiliate links and I am a newby in this field. It just feels wrong to me to have a link with an affiliate account number easily accessible.

I can do this with
- a php script and redirect the affiliate page and make the directory with affiliate pages not crawlable by search engines?
The problem is that I have a stacks of affiliate links and this is time consuming and management intensive.

Or

- with 3rd party service - I prefer not to do it this way.

What is an easy way, that is not going to get the search engines all in an uproar and will hide those links?