(Entry was posted by Loren Baker on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/17/2018).

Does link cloaking affect SEO?

Dumb Question: Do you cloak your affiliate links and if so, did you notice a rank lift (in the SERPS) or CTR% lift (on the links, not the SERPS) after doing so? By cloaking, I mean sending them through a nofollowed redirect on a /go/ directory folder or something like that. ie. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ Thanks.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Alan Bleiweiss:
Loren Baker:
Alan Bleiweiss: Nobody better than Unknown Comic!
Michael Martinez: We do cloak our links. We have not noticed any effect on search engine peformance. Nor would we expect any effect. The search engines occasionally complain about not being able to crawl the links. We cloak because we count the clicks.
Jim Munro: Same
Razvan Alexa: Cloacking is for not showing those long affiliate links and for statistics
Jeremy L. Knauff: We do. Havenâ€™t noticed any difference.