Cloaking Affiliate Links

This is not a new subject – cloaking affiliate links. In case you’re new and do not know what cloaking is, cloaking is a way to hide away a naked affiliate id from the public so that people clicking on the link will not have a chance to steal away your commission by replacing the affiliate id with theirs. (called affiliate hijack or thieves)

Simple right? Well, throughout my years marketing affiliate products I’ve came across a number of ways to do this. But before anything else, let me just remind you to always check on the affiliate TOS as some affiliate programs or network do not allow cloaking links.

Now let’s look at some simple way how to do this. There are basically 3 ways to do this:

• Free method
• Cheap method
• Paid Method

Free Method

Assume that you’re just starting out and do not have your own domain and hosting account yet, this is the best free services that allows you to cloak your affiliate links so that it looks shorter (prettier) and more appealing for people to click on. But always expect some drawback when using these free services; the links will not work if their server is down and the link might turn error for some unexplained reasons at time.

I’ve seen even gurus like Ewen Chia recommends tinyurl and is using it himself (Remarks: Hover your mouse at the “Click Here to lock your membership” link on his site here and you’ll notice from your browser status bar that shows something starting with tinyurl…). I have never use tinyurl but I have come across too many dead links with them, and thus had the fobia of even testing them out.

There are many free url redirect and cloaking services available but 2 that get my attention are:

Clickaudit – The good thing about this service over others is because it also allows link tracking. And I’ve never had downtime with them. All links created work just all right despite the stated terms and conditon on their site. (Please read)

But one major drawback is that you can only create and track a maximum of 10 links only. That’s really bad but the tracking ability is what it excel others common free services (tinyurl, urlfreeze etc.)

Offto.net - This one is by far the BEST free redirect and cloaking service available on the net created by Jon Leger.

It’s very cool indeed. Besides allowing tracking ability, it also allows you to hide the links to affiliate program if this is shown on the affiliate product you’re promoting. Let me show you an example what I mean.

Click on this link http://www.panicaway.com/ and scroll down. You’ll notice that on the sales page there’s an affiliate program offered (bottom of page). So, some people will just join the affiliate program right away and buy from their own link. Now navigate to this link http://offto.net/panicaway_6174/ that was created with Offtonet. Surprise! The word “affiliates” on the sales page is gone!

Cheap Method

By cheap, I mean really cheap. Just a doman name (cost around $6.99 to $9.99 per year) will be enough to do the trick. Okay, if you just own a domain name without a hosting account, here’s how you can do it.

Log into your domain manager and select the domain that you wish to redirect and cloak. Then click on the “Forward” button and you” be presented with a screen similar to below:

Now just enter the affiliate link into the “Forward to” box and choose the redirect type to either move permanently or temporarily. This is not really important but what you choose here will also notify SE robots the same.

Then click on the “Masking” tab. This is optional, but it’s recommended if you want to hide your affiliate details from potential thieves. What you enter here will overwrite the original site info ie. If you masked the titled as “Top 10 Gamble Sites” but the original site that you’re redirecting to was titled “Greatest Gambles Online” your masked title will be shown instead of the original one. The same goes with the description and keywords tag.

Just click OK when it’s done. And allow a few minutes for the changes to take effect. I like to use this method if the vendor site do not have the domain name stated on the sales page. It definitely save time and you can even get some free traffic if the original vendor site does not use its title as the domain and that you manage to grab a domain name similar to the title of the site.

The next method will involve a hosting account. But you can get one around $7.95 per month. So, it’s not really expensive. You’ll have more flexibility with a hosting account as you can make almost unlimited no. of redirects with no additional cost.

There are several ways to do this. If you have hosting that allows unlimited or many subdomains, then simply log into your cpanel and click on the subdomain icon. Create any name that you like and click on add. The subdomain has been created and will look in this format: http://anyname.youdomain.com

Next, click on the “Setup Redirection” tab and you see this screen..

Just enter the affiliate link and click save.

Or you can use a simple html redirect that you upload onto your site. Just copy the code below and replace http://youraffiliatelink.com with your affiliate link and insert the title you want. The link format created will look something like : http://yourdomain.com/anything or if you’ve created a folder to store all redirect > http://yourdomain.com/foldername/anything.

HTML Code
———————-

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><!DOCTYPE
HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" > <html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta
http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Insert Your Title Here</title> <meta http-equiv="REFRESH"
content="0; URL=http://youraffiliatelink.com/" /> </head>
<body><br /> </body> </html>

Listed below are more variations of code that you can use to create a simple redirect. Just replace http://youraffiliatelink.com with the the link your intend to divert to.

Meta Refresh Re-direct

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="1; URL=http://youraffiliatelink.com">

Javascript Redirection Code (to be placed between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags of your html code document.

<script type="text/javascript">
url='http://youraffiliatelink.com';
if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); }
else { top.location.href=url; }
</script>

PHP Redirection Code (to be placed at the beginning of your page. Page must end with .php)

<?php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header('location:http://youraffiliatelink.com');
exit;
?>

ASP Redirection Code

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://youraffiliatelink.com");
%>

.htaccess Redirection Code
You need to create a .htaccess file on your file manager of cpanel. If you create this from within your cpanel, just click on “Create new file” and then “edit file” by inserting the below code and save as ASCII text format.

Replace anyname with a name that you want.

redirect 301 /anyname.htm1 http://youraffiliatelink.com

Or if you’re redirecting your home page then this is the code:

redirect 301 /index.htm1 http://youraffiliatelink.com

Frame Redirect

Just copy and replace the title and your affiliate link (as bolded) below and paste it on a blank html document. That’s it, nothing else to add. Once you’ve done, upload the file to your server and call from your browser to see that the site (your affiliated site) would be displayed under your own domain name.

<!–begin of HTML code –>
<html>
<head>
<title><strong>Put Titles That You Want Here</strong></title>
</head>

<frameset rows=”100%,*” frameborder=”NO” border=”0″ framespacing=”0″>
<frame SRC=”<strong>http://youraffiliatelink.com“>
</frame></frameset>

<noframes>

<body><b>
</b></body>
</noframes>
</html>

<!–end of HTML code –>

SEO Frame Redirect

While this is not proven, it’s recommended that you add in the meta description and keywords for SEO purpose. Below is an SEO optimised code where you replace the description and keywords with yours.

<!–begin of HTML code –>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
<html>
<head>

<title><strong>Insert Your Title Here</strong></title>
<meta name=description content=”Insert Your Meta Description Here“>
<meta name=keywords content=”Insert Your Keywords Here With Each Seperated By Comma“>
</head>

<frameset rows=”100%,*” frameborder=”NO” border=”0″ framespacing=”0″>
<frame SRC=”http://youraffiliatelink.com“>
</frameset>

<noframes>

<body><b>
</body>
</noframes>
</html>

<!–end of HTML code –>

I’ll share with you with some powerful black hat cloaking in my coming post that you’ve never ever seen or ever wondered. Meantime, let me just remind you that certain methods above might not work for certain affiliate program. So, do check on their requirement before implementing any of the above or you may lose your commission instead of saving from thieves.

Take for example, Clickbank do not allow Frames.

Cheers!