cordoba

Affiliate cloaking or redirecting is against Google's policies, but it seems virtually all adult affiliate webmasters do it.

The pros are obvious:

Easy to track how many clicks you're sending.
Visitor more likely to click on a redirect than an affiliate link, and less likely to just type in the affiliate root domain.
If a sponsor suddenly switches their affiliate system (which they love to do) then you don't have to go back and change every single link, just the redirect link.
Less likely to be blocked by ad blocking software (which is becoming almost ubiquitous).

The Cons are (that I can think of):
Against Google's policies supposedly (but we know they have different rules or don't much apply their rules to adult sites).
If you are using a WordPress plugin such as "Pretty Links" and they stop updating or the plugin becomes incompatible with the latest version of WordPress then it's a lot of work to fix.

What do the SEO experts here say? Are the pros sufficient to outweigh any possible Google penalties? And are their pros and cons I've missed?