Is Link Cloaking Necessary for Niches Outside IM?

[TheRichLife]

Is link cloaking necessary if you're selling to the general public, rather than other marketers? My target audience isn't likely have their own affiliate ID to plug into my links. Is there some other reason why I should cloak my affiliate links, or is it not necessary for me?

Thanks

[dvduval]

I would think cloaking would also be needed on webmaster resource type sites, but I'm not sure what people think about others like sports or pharmacy.

[yesacpow]

I would say just have you affiliate link in the form of an anchor text and that's all. The average person who goes to buy online don't even know what the term affiliate marketing means.

[itsliz]

I always cloak links, mostly for tracking purposes though, and for 'future-proofing' it. It makes it convenient if you ever need to change the affiliate link. Say you create a webpage on your site that is a redirect to your affiliate link, then all you would need to do is change the link on that one page, instead of having to locate and change the affiliate link on all of the places you have posted it.

[xiaophil]

Originally Posted by itsliz

It makes it convenient if you ever need to change the affiliate link.

That's a good reason, having a single point for changing your recommended products.

Also if you use a directory for all the redirected affiliate links it's easy to add an entry to robots.txt to ask any spiders not to 'click' your links.

i.e in robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directoryname

Link cloaking is needed no matter what affiliate program you are pushing. The reason why is because it is human nature to say "why should I make you money" - That is not directed towards any one person or any group of people, it's just human nature.

I spent several years in affiliate management so let me give you a few more tips..

* Do not ever use a banner that has the companies domain name on it. If you do then you are asking to lose sales. If you have a merchant that has banners with only the domain name then ask for a blank one or ask if you are allowed to modify the banner yourself.

* Never mention the actual name of the product when doing promotion off site, for example: classified ads, email blast, and etc.. The reason why is this - If you place a simple off site ads that says:

Order Nostalgic Candy & Retro Candy Gift Baskets direct from our Candy Crate

Well obviously all some has to do is go to google and search to find Candy Crate, so instead you would actually use a more generic name.

Order Nostalgic & Retro Candy Gift Bags from our Candy Warehouse

So it makes it a little harder for someone to figure out, thus if they really want it they are more opt to click the link.

Although your links have nothing to do with IM as you stated, I do see many marketers making the mistake of using actual name in promotions and they just have no idea how many sales it cost them.

James

[GarrieWilson]

Cloaking isnt needed. Redirection links are.

[GeorgR.]

Originally Posted by TheRichLife

Is link cloaking necessary if you're selling to the general public, rather than other marketers? My target audience isn't likely have their own affiliate ID to plug into my links. Is there some other reason why I should cloak my affiliate links, or is it not necessary for me?

Thanks

Google MIGHT consider affiliate links as "non optimal" in terms of site quality...so i prefer to cloak whenever i can to conceal affiliate links. They just don't "look" good.

>>
Cloaking isn't needed. Redirection links are.
>>

what he says!