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Please help me understand domain masking

by bellabee
5 replies
I've spent the better part of two days searching and trying to follow the instructions on cloaking and masking my affiliate links. I'm at the point where my links are now looking like mysite.com/product.php however when clicked on it still shows the affiliate url. What step am I missing? I'm so frustrated I could put my head through my monitor
#domain #masking #understand
  • Profile picture of the author wayfarer
    Are you talking about affiliate links going out to another website, or links coming in to your own website? You can't control what happens once your users land on another website.
    Signature
    I build web things, server things. I help build the startup Veenome. | Remote Programming Jobs
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    • Profile picture of the author bellabee
      Originally Posted by wayfarer View Post

      Are you talking about affiliate links going out to another website, or links coming in to your own website? You can't control what happens once your users land on another website.
      Thanks for replying. What I'm trying to accomplish is to NOT have my affiliate ID show once the person clicks on the link. When I was doing a 301 redirect and masking with godaddy - it did just that. But now that I'm hosting those sites on hostgator. I've seen other IM'ers use the technique, so I figure it's able to be done, but apparently I'm missing an important step?
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  • Profile picture of the author mywebwork
    What method did you use to mask your links?

    This link describes several masking strategies, perhaps one of them will work for you.

    How to Mask Your Affiliate Links

    Good luck

    Bill
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    • Profile picture of the author bellabee
      Originally Posted by mywebwork View Post

      What method did you use to mask your links?

      This link describes several masking strategies, perhaps one of them will work for you.

      How to Mask Your Affiliate Links

      Good luck

      Bill

      Good morning Bill - I've used a couple of the methods listed on that page. I tried the php method as well as the htaccess method. I've gotten as far as my links looking like mysite.com/link.php but once its clicked on, the link shows my clickbank hoplink.

      Now I may have done something wrong with my htaccess method ...this is what I did. Is this correct? Am I expecting the wrong result from this method?


      PHP Code:
      # BEGIN WordPress<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]RewriteEngine onRewriteRule ^productname.php$ http://xxxxx.xxxxx.hop.clickbank.net [R]</IfModule># END WordPress 
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  • Profile picture of the author awesometbn
    Here's an idea. You will probably want to check with your domain registrar and look for a feature called domain masking. It allows you to redirect with your affiliate code, but in the address bar of the browser it still shows the domain name you specify. That way your affiliate ID is mostly hidden.

    There might be other ways, but I just checked a few domains I have with Godaddy that I use for 301 redirect to an affiliate link, AND I have their domain masking feature enabled. The resulting web page is actually a frameset. So even if you find a domain registrar that allows domain masking, you are still going to wind up with a frameset on the redirected page.

    Code:
    Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

Parameters:
URL = http://www.example.com/
UAG = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5
AEN =
REQ = GET ; VER = 1.1 ; FMT = AUTO
Sending request:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = x.x.x.x
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...
Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
Date:·Mon,·02·Feb·2009·21:43:01·GMT(CR)(LF)
Server:·Microsoft-IIS/6.0(CR)(LF)
X-Powered-By:·ASP.NET(CR)(LF)
X-AspNet-Version:·2.0.50727(CR)(LF)
Cache-Control:·private(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=utf-8(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:·528(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)
End of Header (Length = 239)
• Elapsed time so far: 0 seconds
• Waiting for additional response until connection closes...
Total bytes received = 767
Elapsed time so far: 0 seconds
Content (Length = 528):
(CR)(LF)
<!DOCTYPE·HTML·PUBLIC·"-//W3C//DTD·HTML·4.01//EN"(CR)(LF)
···"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">(CR)(LF)
<html>(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)
<head>(CR)(LF)
··<title>Example Title</title>(CR)(LF)
··<META·name="description"·content="Example description"><META·name="keywords"·content="Example description">(CR)(LF)
</head>(CR)(LF)
<frameset·rows="100%,*"·border="0">(CR)(LF)
··<frame·src="http://example.hop.clickbank.net/"·frameborder="0"·/>(CR)(LF)
··<frame·frameborder="0"·noresize·/>(CR)(LF)
</frameset>(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)
<!--·pageok·-->(CR)(LF)
<!--·05·-->(CR)(LF)
<!--·7.9-->(CR)(LF)
</html>
Done
Total elapsed time: 0 seconds
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