Google and hexadecimal link cloaker

Does Google penalize for hexadecimal links?

[oldshue]

I saw one or two posts on this topic but no answer

Does Google penalize for hexadecimal links..... this is not the same thing that people think of when you mention cloaking, but it does mask the link. It is used by a few different programs and is known as "Affiliate Link Cloaker" but as I said earlier it uses hexadecimal to hide the standard link and make the affiliate page appear as if it were actually part of the site...

So once again does anybody know if this is a no-no for Google?

Thanks,

Greg Hampton

[oldshue]

bump

[rfgdxm1]

Clarify and give an example of such a link.

[GoogleGuy]

I think we can parse/follow valid links even if they're url-encoded. Not sure about the old trick of using hex-type encoding to bury an IP address so that it's not as visible.

So a) I'm not sure if we follow them, b) if we do follow them, our automatic algorithms would not penalize for them, but c) if someone reported spam involving a page with these type of links, it would be pretty trivial for someone to manually reverse, and doing something like would be curious enough to invite more poking around.

It's also pretty useless for users, who like to have an idea where they'll be going if they click a link. Personally, I'd probably steer clear if it were me. Just a 2 minute take while waiting for a compile though.

[oldshue]

Well here is the page that the program is explained on.... skip about halfway down the page and read the description and see the example ...

[affiliatelinkcloaker.com...]

Thanks,

JO

[TheDave]

I certainly wouldn't pay for software that I could write myself in under 2 minutes. But thats just me and is nothing to do with anything.

[oldshue]

The question was not about buying the software, but whether or not Google penalized for the type of links it created....but thanks for the comments...

JO

[netcommr]

this is a scam targeting the 'not so savy' Internet user who has a small site. run away.