Should we create link for amazon books with rel=nofollow or redirect via 301 in htaccess, or both?

Hi, do you have some knowledge if we create link for amazon books with rel=nofollow or redirect via 301 in htaccess, or both ...

Sorry, but I don't understand the worry about being penalized for linking directly to Amazon. You can use the rel="nofollow" if you don't want to split your page's PR into too many slices and circulate more of it throughout your own domain instead.

But there's no penalty involved in direct affiliate links, and no guidelines are being broken that I know of.

Thankyou Tedster for this assurance.

Well, I am using redirect via htaccess for amazon books at my site...

Links in my site are like
www.mysite.com/am-12345679.html

and redirect code in htaccess is following with 301

RewriteRule ^am-(.*).html [amz_com...] [R=301,L]

I am apprehensive that in my site's webpage it says it is an internal link that is www.mysite.com/am-12345679.html, and then I am redirecting it to another site with 301 permanently moved....

I don't want to use direct link to amazon in my pages...

Do you see any anomaly in above concept of redirecting...

It's not a very standard practice, that's all I see. It might make a manual inspection of hour site more likely. And also I don't see any advantage for you in using a 301. Why not just have a anchor tag point directly to its destination page and use rel="nofollow" to keep all PR on your site? The 301 will mean less PR for your own urls.

Thankyou tedster, it is clear now.
With warm regards
Bye

IMHO, having a 301 is not good. Tedster idea to nofollow the links is good but I will still use some kind of redirect.

If fact, as I believe Google doesn't like affiliates, I will do as follows:

- create a script to redirect to the affiliate site (you link the script and the script redirects to right URL)
- no follow all links to this script
- Disallow in robots.txt this script even before I create it

That way it is supposed that Google won't "see" any affiliate link. And while Google (if they want they can) can still see your affiliate links, at least you've left clear you're not voting for this website.

Yes, depending on the anchor you use this can be considered as hiding the link to your user, but I've seen (and used) this used in many big websites and seems to work fine.

Hi eltercerhombre,

You are right that Google does not like affiliates, so we create the structure of links as if they are internal links, and when somebody clicks those links they are redirected to some other site...

Google might consider these as sneaky redirect?

Should that script pass some header like 301 or 302?

I am sure Nofollow to these links would be helpful, I am concerned that should we pass some headers in redirect script, and how this whole scenario is interpreted in terms of Google.... any kind of penalty or loss of value/pagerank to that webpage in particular or the whole site in general...

If you nofollow these links and disallow the script in your robots.txt then I think you do not have to worry about the header.

thanks eltercerhombre.