Do you Cloak amazon links?

I cloak mine, but for tracking purposes.. I don't give a damn about what Google thinks of my business or how I choose to run it.

I try to be up front with visitors about affiliate links..

As an affiliate marketer myself, I see the advantage of cloaking affiliate links to make it more 'Google-friendly' as well as add a personal touch to it. However, I believe that affiliate link cloaking is just an advantage, but not the solution to everything.

Maybe you can do something on the way you write articles or communicate with your readers, for you to not use cloaking as the only solution. In addition, the websites you are in also make a big positive difference on the traffic your article receives. Thus, might as well work on that, too.

I've been using the real affiliate links for my websites, and for me, it just simply works.

Just my 2 cents. Hope this helps.

I'm with Michael - Not so much cloaking as tracking, but don't use the likes of tinyurl or bit.ly as they are not so trusted any more. ClickMagick does a great job at a reasonable price or if you need free - goog.le - Google's own link shortener is satisfactory.

I don't do Amazon but I cloak all my affiliate links using Clickmagic.
When I do email affiliate marketing I get a higher chance of landing in my subscriber's Inbox with affiliate links cloaked.

Be very careful cloaking Amazon links. You should read their TOS, it is against their policy to cloak links with few exceptions. Ask them directly about the way you want to cloak the link.

al

Do you want to cloak to avoid showing that the link is taking them to amazon or just for good ambience? If it is for ambience, you can use Amazon's internal cloaking (amzn.to/<randomshortcode>) to avoid showing the complete link if wished to. Ofcourse you can customize at the moment. You can access this when getting your product link after logging into Affiliate Dashboard.

Just because every time it rains, I see lots of people using umbrellas, does not mean that umbrellas cause rain.

Similarly, just because affiliate sites tend to rank lower than non-affiliate sites, doesn't necessarily mean that Google's ranking them lower just because they are affiliate sites. As my statistics professor used to say: correlation does not equal causation.

Obviously I don't have access to Google's algorithms, but I strongly suspect that Google doesn't have some sort of penalty that it applies because it isn't "a big fan" of affiliate sites. More likely, Google ranks most affiliate sites lower simply because most affiliate sites suck.

SEO "gurus" may try to complicate things, but Google's intentions are very simple: it's trying to give people the most useful results they can. And most -- but certainly not all -- affiliate sites just aren't that useful. And I find this especially applies to most -- though again, not all -- Amazon affiliates. The so-called "Amazon Review Site" is usually nothing more than a middleman standing between the customer and the page they really want to visit -- Amazon itself. The content is generally low quality and the reviews are usually better written, more comprehensive and more objective on Amazon itself. No wonder those sites don't rank well.

I'd also point out that just because a link is marked "nofollow" doesn't mean Google isn't going to follow it. It just means (or at least is supposed to mean) that Google shouldn't factor that link into it's rankings. But I'd be very suprised if they didn't actually follow the link -- and once they do, it won't take a computer science genius to write a program to figure out that you're cloaking an affiliate link.

Finally, you've said it yourself: it's against Amazon's ToS. To me, that should be enough motivation to not cloak the link. Even if it did somehow help your rankings (which I highly doubt anyway), why risk getting banned? If you can't make money off of your affiliated links because you were kicked out of the program cloaking, those links aren't gonna help your bottom line anyway.

If you want good rankings, the best thing to do is also the most obvious thing to do: create a better website than your competition. If your website is better and more relevant than your competition, you'll rank better than they do regardless of whether you cloak your affiliate links or not. And if it's not better or more relevant... Well, probably you'll be back here looking for even more dubious tricks to game the system...

Sometimes I use the Simple URL Wordpress plugin to market Amazon products on social media. To me the links look a bit more attractive and I can track the clicks. I usually leave well enough alone with the links when just promoting something on my blog or website.

I used to cloak my Amazon links using the Pretty Link plugin, but now I just use Amazon's own shortlink when I find a product I want to promote.

Or sometimes if I'm promoting them on Twitter, since I use SocialOomph, I just click Shorten Link and that "cloaks" it automatically.

I'd say that the mandatory affiliate disclosure Amazon requires you to display might let the cat out of the bag, too.

Another thing - who do you think consumers trust more - some random, often anonymous affiliate or Amazon.com?

I honestly don't see the point to cloaking (different from shortening the link). Seeing that someone is an Amazon Associate is not a big deal and I'll probably be more inclined to buy the product since Amazon is pretty trusted and established.

Thanks guys for helping me. Now, i think that it's better to leave those links raw or use their shortener. So they look as natural as possible.

I do see a bit of a difference between cloaking and redirection. Not much of one really as both ultimately forward to The Amazon product page. But redirection is better for branding you could have a url like http://www.yoursite.com/Amazonproduct as opposed to http://www.Amazon.com/Product/Namele...lesaffiliateid

Wouldn’t most people rather buy something from Amazon that they’d likely buy anyway from someone they know and trust or at least have heard of than some nameless, faceless affiliate selling Amazon products like half the population?

Also, I feel it’s a bit better to have your brand represented in the URL as opposed to using something generic like TinyURL or a similar free cloaking service.

Interesting. Had no idea Google might rank it lower, but then again it doesn't seem to bother most of my pages which rank in my language's keywords. In any case, if cloaking Amazon Affiliate links is against ToS, I'm not going to do it.

Given Google's ability to deliver relevant images via search, I'm going to guess that this 'trick' isn't as foolproof as it appears.

I don't cloak mine.

I could be wrong, but that might be against Amazon TOS.

You should check.