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Why Should I Cloack My Affiliate Links?

by Joe Ray
14 replies
I read this in one of the posts: " if you didn't cloak your affiliate link its possible for someone to steal your commissions from you".

I just can not understand how that is possible, logically this doesn't make sense.

In any case, I want to place a banner to a site (not my own site) to get traffic and I want to send the traffic directly to my affiliate URL. Based on the above, I should not do this?

I'd appreciate some advise.
#affiliate #cloack #links
  • Profile picture of the author hustlinsmoke
    Doesn't matter if you cloak or not you can still lose your commissions and its not stealing.
    What you do is cloak so they don't see your affiliate status and think it is a regular link and yes you should do this to get people to click.

    Now what happens lets say your promoting a product I like and I see your an affiliate so I will go and become an affiliate or have a friend do it and then clear my cookies and buy, this way I or my friend gets the commission, that is what they mean by stealing.

    Oh and if you cloak all i do is click your link see its an affiliate site and then do what I need to do. So cloaking does nothing with someone else getting the commission.

    I call it circumventing though not theft.

    Cloak your links though, it will make your clicks go up. Use pretty links light its free plenty of free programs out there to do it withl.
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  • Profile picture of the author pressreleaseagency
    I think cloaking can improve CTR. People may not click you link and they click your competitor's link because it looks safer. they might think so.
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  • Profile picture of the author FlamingWolf
    Stealing affiliate commission is so 2010

    Honestly, I don't see many people do it anymore. After all, most of the people that will see your affiliate link don't even know what an affiliate program is. Personally I use cloaking not for link protection but to track traffic sources and conversions. Nothing more.
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    • Profile picture of the author Max BNC
      The “historical” reason for cloaking affiliate links is hiding that you’re an affiliate for the search engines. Now I’m not one to think the search engines are stupid enough to be fooled by an easy script like the one I’m providing below, but there are more reasons. The funny thing is that it’s called cloaking affiliate links because of that history, but I digress. Let me give you the three reasons why I do it and why I think every affiliate should be cloaking their affiliate links:
      1. Ease of management
        You sometimes have to change your affiliate links. If you have to change them in more than one place, it’s bound to be a painful exercise, so you want to centralize management.
      2. Prevent leaking PageRank to advertisers
        While sometimes you might want to “hide” for a search engine that you’re an affiliate, for me the reasoning is actually the other way around. Affiliate links are ads, and those should be nofollowed or otherwise prevented from leaking PageRank to the advertiser. Instead of nofollowing each and every link, which is painful and you’re bound to forget at some point, why not make sure search engines can’t follow the link at all?
      3. “Clean” links
        It might be obvious when you’re linking to Amazon that the link points to Amazon, but when I link to say, Genesis, using my affiliate link, the link would point to shareasale.com, which in turn would redirect to Genesis. So the URL of the link would be ugly and wouldn’t tell you where you’re going to.
      Here is the best way to cloak your links.

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      • Profile picture of the author Shaneman
        Cloaking affiliate links makes them look nicer and makes them shorter too.
        The affiliate links that Clickbank provide are so long, it is nice to have shorter neat links as they are easier on the eye for us and for the potential buyers.

        Another reason to cloak affiliate links:

        Often times we save our affiliate links in some type of document on our computer for reference. However if we have a long list of long links that have random letters and numbers - the only real way to identify the web page that belonged to the link is to click on each affiliate link to see what it is.

        If we cloak our affiliate links, straight away at a glance at our document of links we know straight away what the subject matter is of the web page that the cloaked affiliate link is associated with.

        Shaneman
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        • Profile picture of the author agmccall
          Originally Posted by Shaneman View Post


          Often times we save our affiliate links in some type of document on our computer for reference. However if we have a long list of long links that have random letters and numbers - the only real way to identify the web page that belonged to the link is to click on each affiliate link to see what it is.
          Or, when we create that document we add a description

          al
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          • Profile picture of the author PCH
            I don't know if this is a great reason, but I do cloak my links only because I half this thought in my mind that when a customer who isn't a seasoned IM'er hovers over my payment button, I want them to see "domain-name/likes/my-product" rather than heiroglyphics and the word Paypal which means a 'cost' to them. No-one likes 'costs' but people might like 'likes'.

            Kind of like how no-one wanted to live near an 'industrial area', but the same people loved the idea of living near an 'employment zone'.

            Just my 2c
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  • Profile picture of the author internet marketing tools
    i thinks using url cloack is useless coz people don't think it may cause the price change.as a matter a facts they will thanking to you for your references.just a few people still thinking that url cloacking is usefull.
    for better use.url cloack use to hide or manipulate download link of your site to protect your content.
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  • Profile picture of the author David Black 68
    Cloaked links may look nicer, but can Google see right through them?
    And, whilst we're on the subject - does Google penalize sites that have affiliate links on them?
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  • Profile picture of the author stevenco
    Because it looks nicer? Is that really a good reason? Just my opinion but somehow I think most buyers are more interested in the actual linked text or image than what the link looks like.

    If someone is taking time to study the link they are probably smart enough to get around your cloaking when they realise it's an affiliate site anyway.
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  • Profile picture of the author talfighel
    When you cloak an affiliate link, the person who is viewing it will not know that they may be buying from someone who is an affiliate of that product.

    It does look more professional and this can even get you more commissions.

    BUT.........

    Most of the top affiliate marketers don't cloak their affiliate links and still make tons of sales.

    So you can track both ways to see if there is a big difference in sales.
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    • Profile picture of the author Jon Crimes
      Great to see all the different opinions on this

      Personally I do like to cloak the links but I also make sure that my customers know that they are getting taken to another site via my affiliate link.

      I use 'Pretty Links' to do this, for 2 reasons:

      1. It makes the link more pretty! Bet you guessed that one...

      And

      2. It allows me to store all the affiliate links in one place, so when I want to add a link throughout an article or to an image, I just go to my 'Pretty Links' control panel and copy that link.

      Works for me anyway...

      Cheers

      Jon
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      • Profile picture of the author Dani78
        It may make a difference or not, just test it.

        you can use a php redirect.

        But there is no guarantee in terms of commision
        if someone wants to circumvent it, but do it why
        not... you just increase your odds of getting credit.
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  • Profile picture of the author TotalWebsiteControl
    its nice when you can cloak the affiliate link and put it in a folder called like "recommends" or something similar.

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