Cleaning up those Ugly Affiliate Links (non-wordpress)

[CED59]

Hey guys, do you recommend a non-Wordpress tool to clean up ugly, long affiliate links?

Nothing against Wordpress, I'm just using another tool to build my little site.

[CED59]

any thoughts?

[36burrows]

You may have to do it with your PHP, I'd try doing some research but I've always used Wordpress so I'm not 100% sure.

But I'm thinking it's probably along the lines of PHP, Javascript or HTML.

[CED59]

thank you, anyone else have experience with this?

[affilorama-portal]

You could use a plugin called GoCodes: WordPress › GoCodes « WordPress Plugins

[36burrows]

Originally Posted by affilorama-portal

You could use a plugin called GoCodes: WordPress › GoCodes « WordPress Plugins

He's not using Wordpress

[CED59]

yeah, non-wordpress if possible
is wordpress the only thing that people use these days?

[UMS]

It's pretty straight forward to do it yourself with a PHP redirect.

Matter of creating a PHP file, eg: yoursite.com/product.php

with

<?php
header(“Location:http://biglongulgyaffiliatelink”);
exit;
?>

Alternatively, you can use a tool like GhostURL - Affiliate Link Cloaker - Ghost URL that works for both WordPress and non-WordPress sites.

[Kiril S]

Setup a PHP file to redirect to your affiliate URL. Then have your page link to that .php file. Search on Google for how to redirect in PHP.

[CED59]

Originally Posted by UMS

It's pretty straight forward to do it yourself with a PHP redirect.

Matter of creating a PHP file, eg: yoursite.com/product.php

with

<?php
header(“Location:http://biglongulgyaffiliatelink”);
exit;
?>

Alternatively, you can use a tool like GhostURL - Affiliate Link Cloaker - Ghost URL that works for both WordPress and non-WordPress sites.

Beautiful... just the info I was looking for
thank you very much!!

[msafi]

Here's an unpopular thought:

Why clean up affiliate links at all? What's the benefit? Browsers are putting less and less emphasis on the 'status bar'. Chrome and Firefox don't even have status bars anymore. When you hover over the link, you barely notice the faint thin strip that appears at the bottom to display the destination of the link. So, unless your visitor is intent on checking the destination before clicking, they won't notice it. And if they see that you're hiding the destination, they may grow suspicious. And don't insult or underestimate the intelligence of your visitors--they know you're hiding affiliate links. And if they didn't know, this means they wouldn't know the original unclean links are affiliate either.

But more important than all of this is the performance that your website provides to your visitors. Your redirected affiliate links will perform slower than direct links, and we all know how much Google loves speed and a streamlined user experience. One less redirect is better. And your redirects will be followed by spambots and malicious scripts, which may place unnecessary load on your server.

So, why not just provide a straight affiliate link to the vendor and save yourself all the headache?