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Cloaking good for affiliates?

by ps2home
16 replies
Is using cloaking good for getting affiliate sales? One thing I am bad at is getting affiliate sales on my video game blog. Also does Google hate cloaking or is it ok?
Any advice for this.?
#affiliates #cloaking #good
  • Profile picture of the author Miguelito203
    Originally Posted by ps2home View Post

    Is using cloaking good for getting affiliate sales? One thing I am bad at is getting affiliate sales on my video game blog. Also does Google hate cloaking or is it ok?
    Any advice for this.?
    I cloak all my links on my blog. It just makes things look nicer. It doesn't affect rankings or anything like that. If I promote a product that doesn't pay by one of the common networks (like if I'm working with an independent affiliate program), I always make sure to ask if cloaking my links will mess up the tracking just to be safe.

    Good luck,
    Joey
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  • Profile picture of the author thedanbrown
    Cloaking is basically a staple in affiliate marketing. You definitely don't want those long clickbank id's or affiliate numbers in your URL. Especially if you are selling IM products people will just swap in their own affiliate ID in the place of yours in the URL and take that commission.

    If you want a way to cloak your links and also earn money per click then you should check out this free service:

    adf.ly

    It's a URL shortening service
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    • Profile picture of the author TechGeek
      Cloaking affiliate links is a good practice, I would suggest you to cloak your URL as mysite.com/recommended/link. I'm current using simple url wordpress plugin, it's easy to use and shows the number of clicks.

      Originally Posted by thedanbrown View Post

      Cloaking is basically a staple in affiliate marketing. You definitely don't want those long clickbank id's or affiliate numbers in your URL. Especially if you are selling IM products people will just swap in their own affiliate ID in the place of yours in the URL and take that commission.

      If you want a way to cloak your links and also earn money per click then you should check out this free service:

      adf.ly

      It's a URL shortening service
      I strongly doubt that we should use adf.ly for affiliate links. Readers may get impatient and leave the page during the 5 seconds. Furthermore it's just $4/1000 visitor.
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  • Profile picture of the author cvcena
    Cloaking works all the time... Its a necessity...
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  • Profile picture of the author digialun
    I agree with TechGeek. We use recommends links with great success and they are easily trackable.
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  • Profile picture of the author sovereignn
    Google stated that if you cloak your links you're likely to get punished

    On my websites all I do is mark them nofollow and move on
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  • Profile picture of the author dcristo
    There is confusion in this thread. The OP is referring to masking aff links so they look like normal links and not aff links, while others are referring to cloaking pages (visitor sees a different page to the search bot), which is something completely different.
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    • Profile picture of the author atwellpub
      Originally Posted by dcristo View Post

      There is confusion in this thread. The OP is referring to masking aff links so they look like normal links and not aff links, while others are referring to cloaking pages (visitor sees a different page to the search bot), which is something completely different.
      I second dcristo's statement. Cloaking belongs to a different category. OP is talking about link Masking.

      There's no evidence anywhere that Google or any other search engine is offended by link masking, and Miguelito203's sentiment is inline with many others including my own.

      Also, if you've a good link masking tool, you can use masked links to keep track of traffic statistics such as referrers and click through rates and organic keywords the traffic arrived on your page by.
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  • Profile picture of the author supermance
    it will convert better, try to use pretty link plugin if you using wordpress
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    • Profile picture of the author dcristo
      Originally Posted by supermance View Post

      it will convert better, try to use pretty link plugin if you using wordpress
      In this case the problem is the source of traffic. Video game traffic doesn't convert well.
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  • Profile picture of the author alexgold87
    Black Hat cloaking is when you show different result for search bot and another result for real visitor/human.

    White Hat cloaking is when you have a simple redirect with right code (30x or 200) and use this this technique just for hiding real URL.

    If you have entire domain to redirect you can set up CNAME record in cPanel and get result - in a browser people will see your domain, but content will be shown from specified source/website.

    So, not all cloaking techniques are bad.
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  • Profile picture of the author SamDermot
    Banned
    alexgold87, thanks for your explanation, I was not aware of black hat and white hat in terms of clocking.
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  • Profile picture of the author Alessandro Zamboni
    Hi Ps2Home, cloacking is fundamental for affiliates, first for avoid losing commission by thefts, second for giving people a more "user-friendly" link to click.

    About cloacking you can find many Wordpress plugins, free or paid.

    See you soon,
    Alessandro Zamboni
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  • Profile picture of the author Randall Magwood
    Yeah cloak your affiliate links. There's nothing uglier than a raw affiliate link. I sometimes vomit when i see one.
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    • Profile picture of the author brians34
      Newbie question. Do affiliate links (cloaked or not) have to be identified as such like advertisements do?
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  • Profile picture of the author Caprica
    Cloak every aff link...google is with it and users loving it
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