What To Do - Masking Link

Hello all, need some advice

I have a few affiliate websites. I mask my links not to do anything sneaky but to make them look pretty. I have them set up to something like mydomain/go/internetradios you get the idea, then if someone clicks the link they are redirected to my affiliate code.

My question is this, those codes redirect outside of my site but Google is indexing all my go links. Is that a bad thing? I was presuming it was but I can't seem to get google to ignore them. I have added the disallow of the go folder in robots but google doesnt seem to care about that at all.

on another these mask links where 302 but recently changed them to 301 redirects in hopes they will drop off in google, but its been over 4 weeks and not one has dropped, in fact more have been added.

so
1. Indexing these links good or bad?
2. If bad how can I get google to not pay attention to the go links with out having to add no follow on every single link?

thanks

You want these to not be indexed.

You should put a nofollow on each one, and you can also direct google to not follow or index these links in your robots.txt file - which might be the best option.

There are other options but these are the two simplest and most straightforward.

hey

1. I did put the code in my robots but google ignores it
2. we are talkinb about a lot of links to add no follow too, and i hear if you put to many no follows it devalues your site

what is the code in robots you guys would put cause it isnt working for me and any other suggestions please

my robots now

User-agent: *
Disallow: */wp-content/
Disallow: */wp-admin/
Disallow: */wp-includes/
Disallow: */wp-
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/

google still indexes the links

Why can't you put a nofollow on each of the "go" links? If you site it built using a template, or if the code resides in a database it should be easy to add the nofollow to all the links.

If not, you could make a page that Google sees (for your "go" script) that contains the header robots directive for NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW and have a Javascript redirect on the page. I wouldn't do that personally because I link to keep things clean and simple.

I have an affiliate site set up similarly to what you describe. All my outgoing links have a script to cleanly redirect the user (just a basic PHP file that takes a GET variable and sends the user to the right place on the merchant site) and on every one of those links I have a rel="nofollow". My rank doesn't suffer and so far I haven't gotten any emails from users telling me they've examined my code and it's ugly.

My site is built on a simple template so I literally added that nofollow ONE time and it's site-wide. If you can do the same, I would recommend doing so.