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To cloak or not to cloack

by Bozigian
7 replies
When a person clicks on your website and then clicks on the product that you are trying to promote, do you cloak your url or does it even matter?
#cloack #cloak
  • Profile picture of the author Josh Anderson
    Be very careful... So many affiliates use URL shortened or cloaking services and tech they do not understand. Some sniffs out target URL, droops the affiliate URL and does not hit it at all, thus not setting the tracking cookie. In IM so many inexperienced affiliates make this mistake. Thus they screw themselves out of commissions. Far better to use a php or HTML redirect instead.

    Originally Posted by Bozigian View Post

    When a person clicks on your website and then clicks on the product that you are trying to promote, do you cloak your url or does it even matter?
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    • Profile picture of the author polrbearz
      Josh:

      What do you think of Jason Fladlien's link cloaker ? In his recent presentation, he stresses that any cloaking should be ON YOUR OWN SERVER. He makes a great case overall that affiliates are losing more and more sales to various kinds of "theft" and leakage.

      I already have Dr. Ben Adkins' link cloaker but honestly am not tech-savvy enough to know the difference--except that Fladlien's cloaker generates QR codes as well.
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      • Profile picture of the author Josh Anderson
        Honestly... never heard of him and I am not really all that interested in who does what with their solutions... there are thousands and thousands of short url services, link cloaking scripts etc.

        It has nothing to do with being on your own server or not... you could use cloaking software on your own server that screws stuff up to if you don't know what the tech is doing. The only reason someone teaches you to run cloaking on your own server is so you control whether your links live or die.

        You need to test your self EVERY affiliate tracking system with EVERY link cloaker you use and confirm that the cookie was tracked YOUR SELF EVERY TIME.

        Or you could just choose the safe and smart way of doing simple php redirects.

        Originally Posted by polrbearz View Post

        Josh:

        What do you think of Jason Fladlien's link cloaker ? In his recent presentation, he stresses that any cloaking should be ON YOUR OWN SERVER. He makes a great case overall that affiliates are losing more and more sales to various kinds of "theft" and leakage.

        I already have Dr. Ben Adkins' link cloaker but honestly am not tech-savvy enough to know the difference--except that Fladlien's cloaker generates QR codes as well.
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        • Profile picture of the author Jason Fladlien
          Great thread.

          I recommend you host your own redirects/cloaks/masks because otherwise you're at the mercy of someone else controlling your links. Plus free services like bit.ly and tinyurl (and a whole slew of others) get blocked about 20% of the time. Yikes!

          That said, hosting your own cloaked links is not a "holy grail" solution as Josh said. You can still break them.

          If you want to do redirects yourself here are the codes I recommend...

          PHP redirect

          <?php
          Header("Location: http://YOUR_AFFILIATE_URL_HERE");
          ?>
          Meta redirect

          <html><head>
          <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;URL=http://YOUR_AFFILIATE_URL_HERE">
          <title></title>
          </head>
          <body></body></html>
          Always check your links to make sure you're getting credited. Especially if you use advanced redirects that drop cookies (for this to work, the program has to allows p3p headers).

          Of course you can do it manually but not only does our script automate it for you, it allows you to do all sorts of advanced redirects that would be very hard to do unless you were a coding genius (plus is creates QR code redirects!).

          But yep - nothing wrong with doing it manually either, and if you wish to there is the code you can use above.

          Bottomline: I STILL say host it yourself. URL shortening services go out of business all the time (hard model to make profitable). Plus they get blocked a LOT. And they're ugly! And I could go on and on but you get the point
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          • Profile picture of the author myob
            Perhaps even better, which I have found is just use a top domain redirect from within the cpanel with masking. You can buy domain names cheaply, and they look cleaner.
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            • Profile picture of the author polrbearz
              Myob--your technique is also the one favored by Mike Carraway.
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  • Profile picture of the author blur
    Funny, I was just going through some stuff and found that I had bought Ben Schaffer's (sp?) Affiliate Link Bomber.

    Is this tool still relevant to use?
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