Redirect to Affiliate script via htacces - Is that risky?

[goodoil]

Hi,

We are offering an affiliate programme to publishers. The problem is that the links to the Affiliate Script are very user-UNfriendly (something like http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)

I would like to give them a simple url:

www.website.com/PublishersPage

And then redirect this via HTACCESS to the script link (which would then send them back to us).

Would that be a problem for SEO? for Google?

Thank you for your help.

[NakulGoyal]

I don't see this being a problem directly. You will have some advantage in the way of citations and links to

www.website.com/PublishersPage from the affiliate websites, but then these links will then redirect to the script via .htaccess and then back to your website.

How many affiliates are we talking ? If you think from the affiliate perspective, they'd like it as well I am guessing because if I am the affiliate, I would love to link to www.website.com/PublishersPage vs http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)

Do yes, definitely consider doing it. Your affiliates are going to love it. I don't see a lot of merchants doing this. This is definitely something unique.

[AgentsofValue]

If I understand this correctly, you are the merchant, and you have some affiliate software.  Your affiliates will come to your software and get these links to use, which are not clean?  You then want the affiliates to have a clean URL to use to link to you?

That's actually done very commonly by many experienced affiliates already.  In terms of SEO, most affiliates that I know set their affiliate links to go through a sub directory link like /go or /jump.  That directory typically gets blocked in the robots.txt file, so that those links will be completely ignored by spiders - so as a merchant, you'll still get the clicks, but won't get any SEO benefit from doing that.

It really is better if you can just use an affiliate program that gives your affiliates clean links in the first place.  The cleaner your links are, the less likely that affiliates will think to cloak the links on their own websites, and use some techniques that reduce any SEO value of those links for you.  For your affiliates, the simpler / easier you make it for them - the better results you're going to see from your program.