Link Cloaking For Affiliates

It's where you cloak your affiliate link so that people looking at it, or even hovering over the link don't know it's actually an affiliate link. Some sites don't allow you to do this, so you are more likely to see this type of thing on people's own Wordpress blogs. In terms of whether this is considered blackhat or whitehat, it's more along the lines of gray, and it also depends on if it's allowed with the affiliate program that you are using.

**Make sure that the site your posting on (such as Hubpages even) allows this type of thing, if it doesn't, don't do it!

This name convention is something that I've used personally, and I'm not sure if it's public in the terms of it being widely used. The reason why I call this Soft Cloaking is because your not changing the URL of the cloaked link, but rather just relabeling it.

For example,

http://www.youraffiliate.com/Bikes/referral=YourID

becomes..

Check out these new bikes!

When they hover over the link, it still shows the URL pointing to http://www.youraffiliate.com/Bikes/referral=YourID, so it's not really hidden. This is one of the most common ways to cloak your link, and a lot of people do it without thinking about it, because after all it shortens and beautifies your link, instead of showing the long http://www.yaddayadda.com, it instead shows just the text which is short and sweet.

This is accomplished with just using <a href="url">Link text</a>.

Again, this is a term that I use personally so it differentiates between the simple URL relabeling above in the Soft Links portion. The reason is, is because there is a bit more involved with this method, and it may take a bit more work.

You remember up above that your affiliate link was..

http://www.youraffiliate.com/Bikes/referral=YourID

Well, this is where you learn that you can indeed change that to a different URL altogether if you hover over the link to check on if it's an affiliate link or not. while still maintaining the affiliate link. If your using your own site, such as Wordpress you can change the above link example to the one below, while at the same time still maintaining the true essence of the link.

http://www.yourblog.com/new-bikes

If your using Wordpress, this is pretty easy with a plugin. There are a lot of plugins at Wordpress.Org that you can use to change your affiliate links to something else entirely, while still maintaining the affiliate link (so you'll still get money from it). Although this disguises the name of the link, as well as the URL, if they click the link your true affiliate link may still show up when they get to the affiliate site (if they bother reading it up above address bar at that point). But either way, the affiliate tracking cookie is already on their machine.

If you don't have a Wordpress blog where you can simply use a plugin, you can instead go to your FTP and create a folder. I would do it at your root directory and label the folder simply as "go". The folder location would look like this on your site, http://www.yoursite.com/go. Within that folder you would insert html codes that would automatically redirect the person upon clicking on that link straight to the affiliate site through your affiliate link.

Confusing? Here I'll explain it this way. Your true affiliate link is this

http://www.youraffiliate.com/Bikes/referral=YourID

You make the folder called "go" in your root directory via FTP. You open up your website creation software (you can even just use Notepad to make html documents) and put the redirect code in there that automatically forwards the user to the new site while using your affiliate link. For example, if your forwarding it to a site called www.OriginsUltraSports.com/referral=url on your post you would use the <a href="url">Link text</a>.Instead of the URL of that code just being straight to the affiliate site, the URL would go to your page http://www.yoursite.com/go/OriginsUltraSports which is located on your site. When they click that link, it will go to the page you created that automatically redirects and forwards the person to the affiliate site using your affiliate link. Therefore, if they look at the link it would say something like Check Out These New Bikes!, if they hover over the link it will display http://www.yoursite.com/go/OriginsUltraSports. The only way they would know that it's an affiliate link is if they actually clicked on it. Or, I suppose if your like me and know the internet, coding, and such like the back of your hand, I can pretty much tell just by looking at it if it's a cloaked link or not, even if it's disguised.

Sometimes people do use websites such as tinyURL, ow.ly, and more to do this. But, people are usually more hesitant to click on a link like that because they may not trust it. It's just food for thought.

Like I was saying earlier in this article, only do this if the site your doing this on allows it, or your using your own website. On top of that, be sure that the affiliate company doesn't mind that your doing this, read their guidelines and be sure that it's not against their rules. In regards to Hubpages, I suggest that you do NOT do this on here. I haven't, and I'm pretty sure that it's not allowed.