Redirect to affiliate.and SEO?

[kslnor]

I have an affiliate link on my site, which produces a fair amount of sales for the merchant - and a bit of commission for me. Out of curiosity, I have been reading a bit on the subject of creating redirect pages for affiliate links. To be honest, this sounds a little sketchy, though I understand why some site owners do it. So I'm wondering: how does one go about performing SEO for the affiliate link? If a blank page is created with a "this page will be redirected..." statement on it, and perhaps a Title and description tag, how can this page be found in the search engines? Anyone know?

[Philosopher]

I believe you may be misunderstanding what the redirects are used for.

There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of years that Google may "devalue" a site that is primarily made up of affiliate links.

It would be fairly easy for Google to automate the detection of many affiliate links based on the URL. To avoid this, a lot of webmasters have started "cloaking" the affiliate links using a redirect.

So, instead of the link going directly to the affiliate URL, the link goes through a redirect on your site (usually some type of cgi script) that then sends them to the actual affiliate URL.

The webmaster then uses denies that script from being crawled via robots.txt or some other form.

This way, there is not evidence on the site itself of an affiliate link and hopefully the webmaster can avoid any type of automated filtering based on affiliate links (not saying there is one, just that a lot of people believe there is).