Is it necessary to hide affiliate links?

grill_gus

I currently include affiliate links on my pages. The links go to PHP files that in turn redirect to the affiliate pages using the following header code: <?php header('Location: http://www.affiliate-site.com/track/12345678/'); ?> When the page visitor clicks on the link they get redirected to the affiliate page with the tracking code in the title bar. Is there any risk of someone abusing my tracking number or ill purposes? Is it possible/...

Originally asked by MWMoriarty on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Practice of redirecting to your own page has been started long time for 2 main reasons: Adding link click counter in your own PHP code so you can track how many people clicked on the link Preventing your domain from having too many outbound links If your website has too many outbound links directly on the page it may affect your SEO although Google algorithm is much better than 10 years ago and if you have 1 link per article or so I don't think it will have any negative impact. There is also psychological factor and not many people speak about it, a visitor of the page seeing ?ref=122345, if he knows it's am affiliate link he may suspect that your article is not genuine and that you are...

Full answer by NatWeb Solutions: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/126623 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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