Tech SEO Experts: Affiliate cloaking/redirecting - yes or no?

[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?

[TheLegacy]

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.

[fuzebox]

The first click I ever sent to an affiliate program in 2003 went through a redirect and nothing has changed.

Can't believe people hardcoded their affiliate links back then let alone today.

[WiredGuy]

Redirecting an outgoing link is perfectly fine, even Google does this with their own traffic and its a great way to send traffic to alternate links based on different conditions (ie: mobile device hits to a different link or hits from different geos).
WG

[Mr Pheer]

I direct my links to a "page" on my site, but that page is actually the redirect to the affiliate link. I've been doing this since '99 or '00 and it's never bit me in the ass once.

[mechanicvirus]

Letting Google run roughshod was the first mistake this industry made in the post modern tech world.

[Marshal]

302 or 301 HTTP redirects are both fine. As long as it's not JS.

[Beaver1]

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /

The only SEO you need these days to keep these scrapers away from a server!