Can I 301 re-direct my website homepage to my affiliate link - SEO question?

[Chris]

If I have a website at the top of Google for the phrase "How to potty train your child", can I then put a 301 re-direct on my homepage the directs the searcher straight to my affiliate link, or will this affect my rank?

I'm interested in affiliate marketing and I am confident that I could build a website that could rank highly in Google for a phrase like that, but if your homepage 301 re-directs to a completely different website, will my website rank suffer?

Any thoughts please let me know

[Jake]

There are legitimate reasons to redirect to another site that hold up search ranking for a time, I have to think the low ranking power of a typical sales page would sink your home page ranking. Often an intermediate pre-sell page can actually increase conversions, you could just make your home page more of a pitch.

More traditionally one would use Cloaking to show a sales page to everyone but the search spiders, with their increased use of human reviewers and javascript execution it would be a matter of time before that gets exposed, cloaking is a major no-no and would earn a big penalty.

[firstpage]

You can redirect , but if you are ready for penalty .

[Kim Cunnings]

This would be a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines.
In this case, you technically rank with one page, but when the user clicks the result result, they find themselves on a completely different page.
Redirects are supposed to be used for:
- the website tha thas moved to a new domain
- to redirect mobile users
- to redirect the http://www.domain.com to the domain.com
- on multi-language sites
But definitely not for affiliate links

[Anomaly]

I don't think any of the below answers are correct.

First, affiliate link 'cloaking' is not a Google penalty risk and usually just used to make cleaner looking links (e.g. yoursite.com/cleanlink/ rather than affliatesite.com/super-long-string). It's only a risk if it's against the particular affiliate service's rules. Google doesn't care.

Second, it doesn't work like you think (or the other answers are saying)... Here is exactly what happens: if you 301 your site, you LOSE your rankings and pass most of it on to the linked site. You LOSE all credit because your site is no longer ranking at all as a redirect. Redirects don't rank unless you are specifically searching for the URL. Therefore, the traffic WILL NOT pass through your site at all if it is from Google. Only direct type-in traffic will pass through. So it's pointless.