7 Reasons Why to Cloak Your Blog’s Affiliate Links

Talha Safi Blogging

Blog Affiliate Links: Cloak your affiliate backlinks and you’ll maximize their earning potential and conserve time managing your backlinks. In my research, I came across 7 important points which convinced me bloggers need to cloak their affiliate backlinks.

What is cloaking?

Link cloaking is if you make a link with a third party website appear to indicate another page on your website. So when a viewer hovers their cursor in the affiliate link, they see like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/go/affiliate-merchant/

in their browser’s status bar instead of

http://www.affiliate-merchant.com

There are many ways to cloak your links (PHP, JavaScript, plugins, etc. ). Since I exploit Studio Press’s Simple URLs plugin for my affiliate links, I’ll base my examples in this posting on this very helpful plugin.

1. Increase Click throughs

Affiliate URLs tend to be quite ugly. If anyone hovers over an un-cloaked affiliate connection to StudioPress, they will see something like this in their browser’s status bar (note not just a real link):

http://www.domain.com/r.cfm?b=34aurllink=&afftrack=

It’s quite elegant, and the point that it goes a negative feedback and moreoverly prevents a reader from simply clicking that affiliate link.

However, I can cloak my StudioPress along with affiliate links by simply creating internal links that will redirect to the affiliate link. Doesn’t this kind of URL look more attractive?

http://www.cheers4all.com/go/studiopress/

It appears to go on a page of my blog, so the standing of the link is greater than the naked Domain link.

2. Higher Email delivery rates

In case you put affiliate links in email to your subscribers, cloaked links are more unlikely to spam filters than affiliate links. Domain of an affiliate program might get blacklisted by spam filters by overzealous affiliate Email marketers. Consequently any email you send containing a blacklisted hyperlink might not get to your subscribers.

If you send text containing emails, cloaked URLs which tend to be shorter are also more unlikely that to improperly formatted through email clients than long affiliate URLs.

3. Easier link management

Imagine if affiliate program modified the links to it is products or closed business? Unless you’re comfortable using database editing, it’d be a big chore to return through all your blogposts and change the hyperlinks.

If you use the plugin like Simple Web addresses to cloak your hyperlinks, you only have to alter the link in one particular place—very convenient.

4. Reduced Commission loss

A lot of affiliate marketing websites (usually ones that push cloaking software) warn of malware on your visitor’s computers that can replace your affiliate program code with another affiliate program code, stealing your commission. The truth is, I can’t find any hard data on how prevalent this might become. There’s really nothing you’re able to do about it, anyway, except collaborator with structure such as Domain or Commission Junction of which actively demoralize these “parasite” affiliates.

Another form of seizing is when someone gets to a product page, after which replaces your code in the address bar with his or her own code. However, this should be only an issue with plans like ClickBank that allow affiliates to make purchases through their unique links. If you belong to one of these brilliant programs, then cloaking will assist.

Cloaking will also assist against bypassers, who, once they notice they’re about to click an affiliate link, will just chop over affiliate ID and go straight away to the product page. Though if someone desires to deny you a payment, all they have to perform is delete their snacks, so it’s better to never obsess over thwarting bypassers.

5. Tracking

The majority of the cloaking or link shortening WordPress plugins available like Simple URLs or maybe Pretty Link will also monitor how often your hyperlinks are clicked. This is incredibly useful for finding which in turn posts, pages, and/or elements of your blog’s layout are usually driving your commissions.

6. Beat add Blockers

Many of your readers might be using browser extensions including AdBlock Plus that can prevent them from experiencing your ads. Among some other techniques, ad blockers try to find affiliate links to determine if a photo is an ad over the top. By cloaking your hyperlinks, ad blockers will usually allow the banner appear given that it is not hotlinked on the merchant’s domain. So it’s also advisable to download the banner offer graphic file and host it in your server.

7. Easier to Nofollow your Affiliate links

During my last post, I talked about No following your affiliate links to make sure Google doesn’t penalize ones blog’s search ranking. However, manually adding the nofollow attribute personally every time you create an affiliate link is a soreness.

However, once you make certain your cloaked link is nofollow, you can easily use that link again and again throughout your blog. Page link, Several plugins, give you an choice to nofollow the cloaked links from within the plugin interface.

I make use of StudioPress Simple URLs since, just as the name says, it’s simple and doesn’t add lots of extra overhead to our blog. It works by making use of WordPress custom post types and 301 redirects.

Sadly, Simple URLs doesn’t use a nofollow option like Pretty Link, but Yoast shows tips on how to block search engines by simply adding one line for a site’s robots.txt document. If you don’t yet use a robots. txt file, all you need to do is create a text file named robots. txt using these two lines:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /go/

Assuming you’re when using the Simple URL’s default /go/ slug, this code effectively nofollows your own affiliate links by preventing yahoo and google from crawling any link made up of http: //yourdomain. com/go/.

With a side note, if you’re not keen on the /go/ slug, I discovered from trotters Way that you could change it to everything else you like by editing this plugin. php file within the simple-urls/ plugin folder. It is possible to edit this file from your WordPress Dashboard by looking at the Installed Plugins panel and clicking on the Edit link intended for Simple URLs.

Inside editor, search for the phrase “slug” and replace the word “go” with your own personal word, maybe “recommends” as well as “affiliate”. Make sure you don’t wipe off the single quotes round the word.

Don’t forget to change robots.txt file to reflect new slug.

But what about honesty?

Some might argue that link cloaking is a deceptive practice. But which of these two links think most people would claim more accurately tells the reader that the link goes to a new StudioPress page:

http://www.domain.com/r.cfm?b=34as0&u=5sd11&m=2ds469&urllink=&afftrack=

http://www.cheers4all.com/go/studiopress/

I’d say the cloaked link is more “honest” compared to naked affiliate link. If you’re still concerned, there are a couple of actions to make sure you live in your readers’ good graces:

You need to have a good disclosure policy set up that discloses your entire affiliations.
You could also change the title attribute of one’s affiliate links to show something such as “Affiliate Link” whenever your readers mouse within the links.

You won’t manage to please everybody, but the advantages of cloaking far outweigh the few readers you could possibly put off using this system.

Final Notes

For well-known merchants like Amazon, some say that uncovered affiliate links are good for the reason that reader sees the merchant’s area (amazon. com) in the url. While that’s a excellent point, I feel the same can be accomplished with a cloaked link like and you still get the rest of the benefits of cloaking.

http://www.yoursite.com/go/Amazon-product-name/

Last but not least, if you’re interested throughout using Simple URLs, Corrupted Development has a fantastic run-through on how to set it up.

How do you deal with your affiliate links? Do you think it’s shady to cloak your affiliate links?

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Easy 7 Reasons Why to Cloak Your Blog’s Affiliate Links.