Hiding outbound / affiliate links?

What's the latest word?

[HughMungus]

I've heard both that (a) search engines don't like dead-end sites and (b) that you should hide your affiliate links.

Is there any reason I should hide my outbound non-affiliate links?

Is there any downside to hiding outbond affiliate links?

What's the current best way to do hide an outbound affiliate link? Redirect page with a header redirect?

TIA

[rj87uk]

> (b) that you should hide your affiliate links.

Why do you want to hide them? are they not for your readers or are they totaly off topic?

[HughMungus]

I've heard that for security reasons (preventing people from seeing your affiliate ID's) that you should hide your links (use a redirect).

[zomega42]

A redirect will not stop anyone worth worrying about from finding an affiliate ID...

[HughMungus]

So...is there another way? Is it something to worry about?

[netmar]

You can always create a robots.txt file and keep search engine spiders from getting to your reciprocal links page so it won't be listed.

Although, it's not good practice doing so cause it will keep your affiliates from increasing their PR when trading links with you since the page where their link will be won't have even be spidered. But hey, Google made it that way! Up to them to improve their algorythm cause sincerely, their results have been better in the past so I couldn't care less about those "bad pratices". I just won't trade links with webmasters doing so. ;)