Marcia - 7:00 am on Aug 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

There are a number of very good reasons to "cloak" or redirect affiliate links on affiliate sites, not the least of which is not letting some merchants dupe affiliates into unwittingly passing link juice to them.

It isn't "cloaking" in the usual sense of the word, and just about every single big affiliate catalog or coupon site uses link redirection (link cloaking). Just keep the page that's being used to traverse the link from being crawled and indexed.