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It’s a classic dilemma, and honestly, you’re touching on the exact reason why almost everyone in the industry—not just in adult—uses redirects.
The first thing to clear up is the "against policy" part. There is a huge difference between technical redirection and what Google actually considers "cloaking." Google hates it when you show their bot a page about kittens and send the user to a casino; that’s a sneaky redirect and will get you nuked. But simply using a "pretty link" to manage your affiliate traffic isn't the same thing. In fact, most major mainstream review sites use the exact same setup for tracking and link management. As long as the user knows where they are going when they click, you aren't really breaking the spirit of their rules.
You're spot on about the management side of things, too. Relying on raw affiliate links is a nightmare waiting to happen. If a sponsor goes bust or changes their tracking software, you're stuck editing thousands of legacy posts. Having a central "switchboard" for your links is just smart business. Plus, with ad-blockers being as aggressive as they are now, raw affiliate strings are often the first thing to get stripped out of a page, so your "pretty" links are actually a necessity for keeping your revenue stable.
Regarding your concern about plugins like Pretty Links breaking, that's a valid fear. If you want to move away from being "plugin-dependent," a lot of guys just handle this at the server level using a simple PHP script or even just a well-organized redirect folder in their hosting panel. It’s a bit more manual to set up initially, but it’s essentially bulletproof and won't break when WordPress updates.
At the end of the day, the pros far outweigh the cons here. Just make sure you're tagging those links as "sponsored" or "nofollow" so Google doesn't think you're trying to pass SEO juice to the sponsors, and you'll be fine. It’s less about "getting away with it" because it's an adult site and more about the fact that this is just how professional affiliate marketing is done in 2026.
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