September 2007
Monthly Archive
Affiliate Link Cloaking - A follow up
Posted by Simon on 10 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, SEO
I got quite a few emails around the How To Effectively Cloak Affiliate Links post I recently made citing some other sources and techniques to cloak affiliate links. A couple of them were so good I decided to write a quick follow up to let you all know too.
Firstly a guy over at http://studge.com/hiding-links-with-php-and-counting-clicks-with-mysql/ has made a superb and very easy to follow guide on cloaking links using php while being able to count the clicks for each link using a mysql DB. Very clever little script you can include on any site in about 5 mins.
The other source was http://teamtutorials.com/web-development-tutorials/how-to-redirect-affiliate-links which gives another great php based affiliate link cloaking solution.
A few people also pointed out how straightforward it is to just use the htaccess file to perform the actual redirects. Instead of using any specific programs or scripts you can in fact just type the following
Redirect /cloaklinks http://xxxxxxx.cloaklinks.hop.clickbank.net/
Into your htaccess file and you can the direct people to
www.coffeeblack.co.uk/cloaklinks
Instead of the long affiliate link.
Which brings me to the final recommendation which is the Affiliate Link Cloaker software. I normally dont recommend paid software but around 8-10 people have suggested this software to me now so i started to take notice. When you have multiple sites all promoting different programs this now seems to be the best tool going. I have linked straight to it using www.coffeeblack.co.uk/cloaklinks so you can see how a htaccess redirect works and visit it in one go Good luck increasing your affiliate commissions.
If you found this helpful buy me a coffee. (even an espresso helps)How To Effectively Cloak Affiliate Links
Posted by Simon on 07 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
Cloaking affiliate links is neither a bad practice or something to be frowned on.
Unfortunately the word “Cloak” has now been linked closely with black hat tactics and some people now question any time you mention the word Cloaking.
This post is to try and explain how affiliate cloaking works and the reaons for it as affiliate link cloaking serves two useful purposes.
- It allows you to have a link which appears aesthetically pleasing
- It allows you to protect your affiliate links from “Commission Thieves” or untrusting members of joe public who think it is a scam of some sort.