Obviously, a lot of us are affiliates here and a lot of us probably use plugins like thirsty affiliates or pretty link to cloak. As we all know, these are usually in the form of website.com/recommends/your-affiliate-link Anyway, regardless of whether you 301/302 the actual destination, they look like they are internal links to search engines (for the record, I've blocked this fake folder in my robots.txt file). With nofollow added on top of this equation, does it have any negative effects on SEO/panda issues etc? Might Google perceive this as pagerank sculpting? It seems like a simple bit of info, but I've actually racked my brain about this all day lol.
No, they do not look like internal links to search engines. Google follows every link, so the bots will visit that link and eventually end up on affiliate offer anyway. You may nofollow them to keep the link juice for yourself, but don't think for a second that Google doesn't know where your links go. Also, if you realy want to hide your links from google, use plugin as Link Ninja for example.
