Why hiding your affiliate links behind 301 redirects?

Easy maintenance

If you have 1000 pages with the same affiliate link in it and if someday your affiliate link changes, you have to update the links in those 1000 pages. There are search and replace modules and solutions, however, there are simpler solutions. You can create redirections in HTACCESS or install a wordpress plugin like redirection.

Let’s imagine that your affiliate link is an Amazon affiliate link. You can create a redirection that will look like /a/amazon-product/ => amazon product link

Thus if someday, this Amazon link changes, you will only need to change the Amazon link in your htaccess file or in your plugin. You will not need to replace 1000 occurrences in your database. 

Nofollow

Also, you may decide to add a “Disallow: /a/” in your robots.txt to prevent googlebot to follow the link. This will be like a rel=”nofollow” in the A tag of the product link. 

Example: thewirecutter.com

Thewirecutter.com is a popular affiliate site. Thewirecutter.com totals 12 millions sessions on a monthly basis. It uses a domain for affiliate links, wclink.co. In wclink.co/robots “disallow: /” which means that googlebot will not follow any affiliate links on thewirecutter.com

A subwoofer has the affiliate https://wclink.co/link/6978/20454/4/37399/546265071.1539417354?merchant=Monoprice

It redirects to www.kqzyfj.com/links/5513721/type/dlg/sid/AgEAAAAAAAAAAJIXAAAAACCPV-8AAAAAW8GlCg/http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=9723