301'd Affiliate Links On Your Own Site (Follow vs NoFollow)... Does it matter?

A lot of people will throw a .htaccess redirect on their affiliate links to make them look better.

So it's like yourdomain.com/productname instead of the ugly aff link.

If you're putting that link into a blog post or something, does it matter if you follow/nofollow the link for your own on-page optimization?

It's not necessary to nofollow your affiliate links according to Matt Cutts, but you can nofollow them if you are worried that they might affect your rankings. Read more at: http://www.webpronews.com/heres-wha...ys-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06

Google's crawlers can distinguish between normal links and affiliate links, so it doesn't matter whether you nofollow them or not. If they are going to penalise your site for affiliate links, they will.

What you should be concerned about is how many affiliate links appear on your site. Don't put too many on one page and don't include them in the majority of your site's pages.