Is link cloaking bad?

[jwdesign]

I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites.

In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links.

Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter?

Thanks for your help.

[KeriMorgret]

I can't make a judgement on it, but you might check out Graywolf's recent post this month on masking affiliate links. http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/

[jwdesign]

Thanks

[jwdesign]

Thanks

[STPseo]

Okay... when I think of cloaked link I think of a link that is being hidden from the user and is there only for keyword or other SEO purposes. If your link has a function, I think you are okay and the nofollow should do the trick.

[StalkerB]

So you use robots.txt to disallow indexing of anything under the /bet/ folder, you link to 'bet/XYZ' using nofollow and 'bet/XYZ' has a redirect on it?

I'm going to go with safe. It's a fairly common practice.

[jwdesign]

Not sure I explained my self properly, so if I show an example that might help.

The links I am cloaking are behind buttons which say 'bet now', the cloaked link is http://www.comparebestodds.com/bet/betfair/ and is set as nofollow.

The link which is cloaking is
http://www.betfair.com/?clkID=16251_67988CCB46EC4C389F77AD796257F6&rfr=16251

This links are important as its what will make money for my site, and they are important to the users as this is what they need to click to get taken to a site to place a bet.

Hope that makes it a little clearer.

Thanks

[RDK]

It sounds like you're already nofollowing the links.  This will reduce the number of links on your page as the Search Engines see it, which looks to be your goal.

Assuming this is what you're aiming to do, there's no reason to hide your links.  If you don't want search engines OR users to see them, just get rid of them altogether.

[STPseo]

So are the links usable to visitors of the site?

If you think the links are valuable, you should add the "nofollow" tag to not send over any link juice. Keeping them hidden from the visitor is a bad practice and I think could potentially get you penalized. If you don't want them used, then don't have them on the page.