Every heard of affiliate link cloaking? It is basically the practice of hiding affiliate links so your users don’t bypass them, and deprive you of a commission. Some people will argue that affiliate link cloaking is deceptive or unethical, but I’m still unconvinced either way. I thought it would be useful to dedicate a post to the subject and I hope you all find this to be helpful!
How to Hide Affiliate Links
There are now free services out there that do all the work for you, like AddMe’s Link Cloaker (which happens to be broken) or this one, and there are plenty of other guides and tutorials to help you hide your links. Last week, even the famous infamous John Chow gave a primer on hiding affiliate links. Another good post, called Cloaking and Ranking Your Affiliate Links can be found over at the Earner’s Blog. This post discusses one technique in particular that you can use to hide those affiliate links you’ve got on your website.
Is link cloaking ethical?
Should we tell everyone which links on our sites are affiliate links? I believe that most internet users aren’t very aware of affiliate linking, and probably wouldn’t care much either way. I look at affiliate links like parked domains. The majority of internet users don’t know what domain parking is and likely could care less, but will go to a parked site and click on a link regardless. I think the only way this will stop is if either the government or a major player like Google begins to clamp down on the practice.
More on Link Cloaking
- Dave Taylor writes a good discussion of link cloaking in his post Should I Cloak External Site Links? It covers a few different viewpoints on the issue and is a must read for anyone considering doing a bt of cloaking.
- Another good piece comes from Search Engine Land, and is titled Good Cloaking, Evil Cloaking & Detection. This article talks about different types of cloaking, and discusses which, if any are good and/or evil.
- Andrew Girdwood wrote a rant on cloaking, arguing that it is a sneaky and deceptive practice.
What do you think?
If you know of any other cool tools or posts on the subject, please share them with us!
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way back poeple thought a Franchise should be illegal
its the scamers that make affiliate marketing look bad
Can anyone please tell me what is the best link tool to inbed an affiliate id in the url of a linding page im prmoting Thank you Gene
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