masking affiliate links with a "go url" rediredct

[danclarkie]

Tweet

Hey.

As I'm sure you know this is pretty much standard practice for affiliate sites for reasons of tracking and so on.
so the link instead of being
hxxp://www.merchant.com/offer?affiliateID

becomes

hxxp://mywebsite.com/go/123

and the go url redirects 301 to the affiliate.
The go URL link would be set as nofollow and also disallow the /go directory in the robots txt.

Anyway the problem I face is I have an affiliate site that is ranking fairly well but I want to introduce this system.

Should I apply the go URL redirect only to new articles or should I apply it backwards over all existing affiliate links.

The thinking is google would notice overnight that a lot of external links become internal links but there are 100% white hat reasons for doing this and I think that by NOT applying it to existing links then you are doing that ONLY in fear of google which I think isn't what google is looking for.
Note only affilaite links are affected, so authority links like to wikipedia etc remain

tl;dr
Should I apply go url masking to new articles only or back date it replacing existing affiliate links.

My opinion is to apply it to all external links both new and old, especially with the new Panda Update algorithm.

Cheers!

[melovemoney]

I just use a php redirect on my domain. So if I'm linking to dogsecrets it would be domain.com/dogsecrets.php which looks professional and is accepted by search engines. Just a suggestion.

[dietcola]

my vote - apply to all.