A Cool Internet Marketers Trick To Cloak & Protect Your Links
June 14th, 2009 | by admin |So every once in awhile I hear or read on the net about people getting the affiliate code riped out of their links. Never had it happen but I guess it dose. Please don’t try here. Hearing a story on Twitter today inspired me to write this post.
OK there are a few reasons affiliate marketers use link shortening website and other methods to change links. The most popular I hear lots is they don’t want customers seeing the affiliate code in the link. Makes sense, but considering Internet users are getting savvy they more than likely can see it anyway. I have more than one FireFox Addon that does that.
Another reason is of course security for those concerned. Link stripping other bad stuff.
The most authoritative webmasters and bloggers have trick that takes care of all these concerns and helps with one more.
To many links going off site and sending page rank with it. Sure you can put a no=follow tag, but users can still see the affiliate link.
OK so this is what we do. Well before I go on I have to say I learned this by using a tool from a affiliate program I belong to and need to give credit to him. Ian Fernando is the developer of Bans templates and Twitter traffic Exposed. He has many other services I use. He’s great. Meet him on the BANS Forum when they first started. Almost forgot here his link. Ian Fernando
Back up all file that you work on just in case you break your site! and test, test,test.
Think about it a rel=nofollow only tells the search engines not to pass on pagerank. So as a marketer I believe hosting everything that go’s along with a affiliate link when possible. Basiclly the link, photo’s and anything else is sent through a redirect in a folder on your host.
So what you do is create a folder in the root of your site. Name it whatever.php. After that you create the redirect that looks something like this. Their should not be any spaces. For some reason the code in the post in getting blown out. If you have issues just sign up for Ians program and use his tools. Sorry.
<?php header( “xxxx/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” ); header(”Location:xxxx://www.affiliate_link_here-dot-com”); ?>
Put the code in the folder you created!
When a user clicks on (xxxx’s r so code is broken) xxxx://yourwebsite.com/whatever.php they will go through the redirect and only see the url of the site you sent then to. They will not see something like this we see to much of. xxtp://yourwebsite.com/?ref=1234.
Come on everyone knows what the affiliate redirect on the end is. Dopes, Doh.
We can take this one step further by running the affiliate link through a site like bit.li so even the most snoopy people will have a hard time seeing.
In this case you make the redirect but insert the affiliate link after you shorten it. So for example it could look like.
<?php header( “xxxx/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” ); header(”Location:xxxx://bit.ly/xyz123″); ?>
!!!!!! (xxxx’s are to see code in post replace with http)!!!!!
Takes the link through one more redirect for true cloaking of a link, but the site could lose google love if any to bit.ly
Users go something like, — your_link>Host/Redirect>bit.li>affiliate site.com
If you want a tool to do that and be part of a great affiliate program click on Ian’s link above and sign up.
If you noticed this site is pretty messed up. I have 0 PR and a store on the front end. Not good right. I’m going to be rebuilding soon. I found a new Product that’s being launched at the end of June. It’s called The Site Flipping Code. I will write about it real soon.
They say they can take any site old, crappy or ugly looking, any thind and re develope it and sell a site with in a few hours. They have a 15 year old kid that made like $2′800.00 in 12 days. Here’s a link if you want to see for yourselves. Site Flipping Code
