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Why are URL's "cloaked" on many affiliate webiste?

by calumdf
2 replies
Hi,

All of the websites below drive most of their traffic from Google ads. They are clearly affiliate websites making money from reviews and top list of products. But when you however over the buttons you can see that they cloak all their links.

top10.com/online-grocery-services
compare.tech.co/best-crm-software-uk-v1

For example on the last link you can see that the link for monday.com is "compare.tech.co/go/mondaycom-crmsoftware_uk_cpc" which then re-directs you to monday.com?



What is the reason for doing this? Is this so that the google bots don't pick up that you have affiliate links on your landing page? Or is this mearly a tracking thing?
#"cloaked" #affiliate #url #webiste
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  • Profile picture of the author santosjaimes
    Google devalues affiliate links. Google "prefers" to crawl and rank informational sites instead of affiliates sites that G thinks are just trying to make a quick buck by saying nice things about the products they advertise.

    Think about the web hosting industry, you search on G for "best hosting company" or "cheapest hosting company" and all you see are sites recommending affiliate links for HostGator, Godaddy, Namecheap, etc. and those are big hosting companies that are willing to pay good money to affiliates so affiliates say only nice things about them in their posts, and I can tell you from personsal experience that Hostgator is not what it was in 2003, I left them for good in 2018.

    So, people cloak to make googlebot belive that those sites are not affiliate sites, but if they don't cloak with {REMOTE_ADDR} they are not good at cloaking.
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  • Profile picture of the author Youcanconverttosales
    It is twofold, first I agree what Santos says plus you need to cloak for filtering and tracking purposes.
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