Avoid the sandbox or a google penalty, no visitor wants to see weird 100 character long Links when hovering over the URL’s, whether its on your landing page or in your content, it doesn’t look nice and it looks rather suspicious. By cloaking the links your click through rate will be increased. The easiest way is to use .htaccess and redirect the links, if we wanted to cloak the following affiliate link http://www.myaffiliatesite.com/1.php?=yadda&111 look at the tutorial below.

1. Add this in .htaccess Redirect /myaffiliatesite http://www.myaffiliatesite.com/1.php?=yadda&111

2. You must add no follow snippet in the html code where the link located e.g. <a href=”http://www.mysite.com/myaffiliatesite” rel=”nofollow”>Myaffiliatesite</a>

3. Disallow the link in robots.txt

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /myaffiliatesite

This should be a sufficient enough to cloak affiliate links for a small site but you must make sure you Disallow them in robots.txt and use the nofollow method, this stops your site from receiving a google penalty which has happened to me in the past, if your affilite links appear in google search when doing a site:search you can remove them in google webmasters.