Will 301s to Amazon Hurt Site?

[jgoethert]

We have 155 podcasts and in many we have affiliate links to Amazon. But I recently found out that one of the two products we are promoting is no longer available. I now have to fix many podcast descriptions.

My thought is maybe to build a link like: financiallysimple.com/camera and 301 it to the Amazon product.  That way if the product changes, I simply change where the 301 points. Simple.

BUT my question is does that bouncing people offsite immediately hurt us?

Are there any other options that will accomplish the same goal?
Thanks!

[willcritchlow]

With the caveat that I'm not an expert in the affiliate space, the advice I have typically seen given in these situations is to put all the targets of the links on your site into a folder like /outbound/ and then block that entire folder in robots.txt so that the search engines don't crawl those links / don't see the 301s. I wouldn't have thought that would be sufficient to think that they don't realise that you are running an affiliate model, but there's nothing wrong with that business model per se.

As far as linking out and sending people off to another site a lot, no, that sounds like the right user experience in this situation, and I can't think of any other way of achieving what you are trying to do.

Good luck.