Thanks For the Info , Guess ill try it to see if the code comes out correctly with the ? or %3

Very interesting (or at least interesting in reminding why I never want to be a tech guy...)

Redirectmatch permanent makes %3
redirect 301 makes ?

So Graham, are you using "redirect 301" in htaccess and that has been tracking fine for you?

Yes PPP, that is how I am doing it, and haven't noticed any tracking problems (ie. I am still seeing activity on all my affiliate trackers).

Here is an example of what I have in my .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /out/absolute http://www.absolutepoker.com/main.as...7a_23793b_3260

So when I want to put a link to absolute poker, I link it to http://www.bankrollboost.com/out/absolute, which then takes you to my affiliate link.

I am still learning about .htaccess files, but have been using this for at least 4 months now and still haven't seen any problems. If someone has any reasons why this shouldn't work I would love to hear it (i.e. it may not work on certain browsers, etc.), because maybe you are right PPP and I am losing some of my traffic.

Also, I finally got around to editing my robots.txt file to stop crawling the "out" directory to conserve the PR 100%.

It looks like that will work, which is great. The Redirectmatch permanent way of doing the 301s was leading to breaking the "?" in the URLs.

"Also, I finally got around to editing my robots.txt file to stop crawling the "out" directory to conserve the PR 100%."

This does nothing at all to conserve PR. The only reason to do it is so the search engines don't see you linking to some of the spammier cardrooms. It does however lead to you showing URL-only listings for all the URLs like
http://www.bankrollboost.com/out/absolute
which may have some downside (though unlikely)

Doing the robots.txt disallow discards the PR -- that is, you don't send it to the cardroom, but you don't "keep" it yourself. It's just gone into the universe.

So to PPP And Graham

When i set up to redirect from cpanel , it asks if i want permanent or temp , i should go with the tempoary ?

As from what i think your saying ppp is that the permanent one messed up the link ,

Thanks for the info :(. I would rather not give them the PR, then I can out rank them for terms we are competing for ;) (not that I will really make a difference). Hmm, I think I will keep it out for now. I dont see any of those redirect pages ranking on any search results so it shouldn't be a big deal.

As for 27offsuit's question... I am not sure how your CPANEL works and would suggest creating the .htaccess file yourself. Otherwise contact your hosting provider and check with them.

No. Both ways I was describing are "permanent"

301 = permanent
302 = temporary

Doing it via cpanel is risky. You should see the exact text generated in htaccess... for example you may have it set up so a trailing slash appears at the end of the tracking URL. This will usually redirect just fine, but might not be tracked by the cardroom properly. Definitely ask your host about your htaccess setup.