Terry,

Some people believe you may be actually penalized by SE's for not masking affiliate URLs but that's not likely unless you have a spam blog with no real content and a gazillion affiliate links.

More importantly you might want to use one of those wordpress plugins to make your affiliate links more friendly to your users.

[edited by: caveman at 3:06 am (utc) on Dec. 29, 2008]
[edit reason] Edited per TOS #24 [/edit]

I personally am not aware of, nor do I believe, that SE's penalize sites for having aff links. The SE's do not hate affiliates. They hate dup content and reused content and feed content that is masquerading as original content. Basically, they prefer to show unique, useful content.

Since by their nature aff sites, or sites that derive significant income from aff efforts, are not showing unique content, from the SE's POV the onus is on the individual sites to provide unique content and/or otherwise add value.

Sites that are unique and provide added value to the Web are very, very unlikely to be penalized or banned, if that is their only issue from the SE's POV. But so-called thin affiliate sites that provide no added value are likely to have a very short shelf life.

There are plenty of successful sites out there that do not hide aff links.

Thanks for your input with this. I've decided to mask the links - just so it all looks neat and also so people click on the links... I know a lot of people see the weird looking link and then decide not to click on it even though they don't know what it is anyway!