Subscribe Feed (RSS)Affiliate Link Cloaking: Free Tools, Tutorials & Discussions
May 1st, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Affiliate Marketing, Making Money Online.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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I’m an affiliate marketer and as a result I can see both sides of the link cloaking issue. No one should have the right to steal or remove an affiliate ID. In so far as knowing who is posting an ad I see it like this. In the world of bricks and motor retail sales many stores are owner operated under Franchise Agreements with the Corporation that owns the Brand name on the store. Most people that go into a Pizza shop, as an examples, don’t care who the owner is, they just want to buy some Pizza. Affiliate Marketing is much the same. As a marketer you are reselling a product for someone else, it just happens to be over the internet, this is especially true of you are running a PPC or any other paid ad campaign.
The best link cloaker I have found is Jay Jennings’ Cloak And Tracker. It runs on both Mac and PC platforms, which is a rarity, and allows you to change links on the fly as you mentioned above. You could have an ebook with your affiliate links in it that goes viral, and then the site your promoting goes belly up — all you do is change the link via Cloak and Tracker and you’re saving that traffic. And the tracking is an added bonus to boot.
The price was recently lowered to $27 (from $49) so it’s a great deal: http://www.cloak-and-tracker.com
Regarding Link Cloakers - I am using tinyurl to hide my links. Is there any reason why you did not mention tinyurl ? Is there something I should know about them ?
I don’t understand why anyone would consider link cloaking to be unethiclal, It was due to the affiliate marketer’s effort that the visitor
even came to know about the product (that help solve a problem) so why should the affiliate marketer get cut out of the transaction as they most likely spent time as well as MONEY to get the sale?
link cloaking IMHO can’t be regarded as an unethical practice.The thing is if you are selling crap to your customers it’s unethical and if you do that with or without cloaking your affiliate links it definitely fits into the category of unethical affiliate marketing.But If you are promoting a good product with or without link cloaking it can’t be said to be unethical.Link cloaking just increases your chances of sale ..
Tiny url and same domain redirects are fine for these type of links, as long as you dissallow the redirect folder in robots.txt…
Great Blog…
adwords conversion rate 60 percent
Why do you need to disallow the redirect folder in robots.txt?
What do you mean anyway?
Is this service ok? http://www.off2url.com