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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.

Thanks effectdigital, Screaming Frog did show H1s on blogs so I am going to assume it is a non-issue.

Roman, Good info here... still studying to try to make sense of how the "boxer" example (with very similar products) translates to "taxes" or "retirement" where every article is (supposed to be) very different. Thanks again. John