Masking Affiliate URL's Properly In Today's Environment

[JS_Harris]

It's no secret that pages with affiliate links aren't looked upon highly by Google unless you also provide a lot of other excellent and useful content on the same page as your affiliate link.

It's also no secret that as people increase their browser security settings or new versions of browsers are released they block cookies from many affiliate networks. I just upgraded a free widely used scan program and see almost every major affiliate added to my Firefox cookies "block" list thanks to the "immunize" feature of the scanner.

On top of rankings issues and cookies being neutered costing me referral income I'm also seeing the problem of redirects in general setting off browser alerts. Even webmasterworld triggers a warning "firefox has stopped this site from attempting to redirect..." after you submit a post if you have security set to high.

So... with all that fun stuff to consider here is what I'm doing, could I do more ?

- Pages, my affiliate links are on lengthy review pages only.
- Links, all are nofollow and, thanks in part to mod-rewrite, all lead to a .php file for execution so they all appear internal.
- The php file has a list of known bots, if it detects a bot visit it returns a blank page with the noindex and nofollow tags applied. If it's not a bot the file sends them to their chosen destination based on the link they choose.
- cookies, so far none are being blocked when I browse my own site.
- redirect blocker, so far none are being blocked when I browse my own site.

I'd like to know if there is a better way to do all of this, not just "another" way, I do mean better. My concern with this method is Google's warning about not creating content for crawlers that differs from what regular visitors see. I'm not sure if the blank page would qualify.

I also know that Google can see exactly what I've done so this isn't really to trick Google, it's to avoid loosing my affiliate earnings because of heightened security measures on visitor browsers. The affiliates I choose are disclosed in my terms of use and are industry leading sites used by tens of millions of people yearly.

Thanks in advance

[johnnie]

- The php file has a list of known bots, if it detects a bot visit it returns a blank page with the noindex and nofollow tags applied. If it's not a bot the file sends them to their chosen destination based on the link they choose.

Thou shalt not cloak. Blank page or not, if you're serving up *different* pages to the user and search engines, you're asking for trouble. I think the best way to implement affiliate links nowadays is in clean linking schemes, where the merchants uses a referrer check to accredit the affiliate.

[jimbeetle]

referrer check

The referrer isn't sent in many cases. What happens then?