Social Site Link Bouncing For Affiliates

I've been noticing a lot on Facebook that people will use link cloaking in conjunction with social networking platforms. Basically what you do is get a rather large amount of people, typically into the thousands, and then post links straight back to your blog.

Now your wondering what my point is? I'll explain. I'll use Wordpress as an example here, you can cloak your link by creating a file in your ftp directory that manually forwards the people to the affiliate site along with your tracking cookie. This is to make it appear for all those who are viewing the link, to be a regular link straight to your blog. So people won't know it's an affiliate link until they've already clicked on it, and by then it's already too late since they already have a tracking cookie on their computer. I don't think this concept is morally acceptable for the good natured website enthusiasts out there who are trying to make money online. But you do know, as well as I do, that there are people out there willing to do this for the extra bump in revenue.

I'm not going to go into specifics being that it's not that incredibly hard to figure out, but needless to say, I'll explain it a little bit. Basically, you make a redirect area on your website that goes to the affiliate site, but the redirect also contains the affiliate tracking code. So technically, you can post this link anywhere, on social sites, emails, or anywhere else on the internet.

This can cause, and be the root of, a lot of spam on social networks. People really dislike spam, especially if they are there to just have a good time and not get hit by advertisements, or even advertisements dressed up as something else (ie, this method). Affiliate companies may or may not approve of this method, but that depends on the affiliate company. Some affiliate companies don't care what you do, just as long as it's not deemed as illegal (and even if it were, some may look the other way).

I wouldn't do this, aside from the problems it could cause if your affiliates ever found out (assuming they care), is that I hate polluting the internet with utter crap just to make some extra money. Although, there are those people out there that would fill the internet with a bucket load of steaming goodness, just to make that extra pocket change.

There are a lot of honest ways for making money online, some of them require a bit of work, while others don't. I would recommend sticking to the high road and going about it in a fashion that doesn't require tucking affiliate links into other links for the soul use of putting them on other sites. I do believe that the whole affiliate cloaking mentality is good in nature, depending on how you go about it. It's a very fine line between doing it in a good way, and in an evil way, in the eye's of the internet world. Changing links on your own website is one thing, but going to another site and using your website as a trampoline laced with sticky affiliate codes is another story altogether.