Originally Posted by Colmike7

To those arguing about cloaking and G:

"The original version of affiliate link cloaking involved hiding your links from Google and other search engines. This was based on the theory that Google would penalize web sites which used affiliate links. What Google actually says is that they don?t want to see affiliate links without substantial content included together with it.
Regular product websites and blogs are fine, but if I were to set up a page which showed just the affiliate link with some very light content however, or worse, scraped content, then it would not do well in the SERPs.

Because of this issue, many people started to cloak their affiliate links by giving the Google bot one version of a link and human visitors another version. The thing is, Google?s engineers aren?t stupid and they learned how to detect this. It is this kind of link cloaking which they specifically frown upon and which will get you sandboxed or de-indexed."