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What I am saying is that I want surfers to know where they are going and every time I see a cloaked link or experience a redirect I exit that site immediately.
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LOL JazzyGuy, redirects are how the majority of affiliate networks track affiliate traffic.
Link cloaking is/has been used by blackhat
seo'ers. Many have moved on to other ways since the search engines have gotten smarter about detecting it. But it involves more than fastfish is talking about.
There can be very legitimate reasons for an affiliate to redirect their links (meta refresh, 301 or 302 redirects). It's very common for DB driven sites. It also provides extra analytics for the affiliate. For what FastFish is describing, they also get the benefit of knowing how many of their affiliate links and which ones were clicked on independently of what the network or merchant reports. The redirect pages will show in their stats, each page view means a click.
You can get some weird spidering with redirect pages by the SE's though that can be problematic. So if you want to avoid any problems with the engines there are a couple of things you can do:
1. Use the rel=nofollow. You'd put that tag in the a href link along with your target=blank tag
2. You can use the put no index in your meta tags on the page where your meta refresh is. Actually you can put no index, no follow.
3. You can put all your redirect pages into one directory so your link to the redirect page would be mydomain.com/merchants/redirectpage.html
You then add a line to your robots.txt file to not index the "merchants' directory.
2 and 3 are the most common ways I see other affiliates handle it. But you can do any of them or all of them if you really want to cover your bases.