Ask Shawn Collins: Link Cloaking Techniques

by on February 20, 2006

I’ve been reading a lot lately about affiliate link hijacking and link cloaking. Do you recommend any particular link cloaking software or technique and/or are there any particular ones to steer clear of? I saw one ‘Covert Affiliate’ that in addition to cloaking affiliate links puts a tracking cookie on the visitors computer even if they don’t click on the link. They talk about having the ‘unfair advantage’… that concerns me that if you’re doing something ‘sneaky’ that it could actually bite you in the butt down the road.

There are two ways you can go about cloaking your links: set them up yourself or buy a program to automate the process.

Personally, I do it myself. In some cases, I use a little mouseover script, but that’s just to trick the casual observer – it won’t beat the schemers and spiders.

In the past, I’ve also used frames to cloak affiliate links. This has it’s limitations, but it’s quick and easy.

Another method is to purchase a domain and use the domain registrars forwarding service (free with most domain registrars) to have the domain redirect to your affiliate link.

The technique I use most often is the .htaccess redirect. An .htaccess file is a plain ASCII text file you place in the root directory of a Unix server.

The .htaccess technique is much easier than using other redirects, because there’s no HTML required. All of your redirects are in one text file.

One thing to bear in mind when cloaking your links is that you should add the afsrc parameter, so legitimate adware affiliates will recognize that you are an affiliate and not overwrite your cookie.

If you want to get a program that will help you set up the cloaked links, check out CBmall and search for cloaker or cloaking, and you will see lots of programs to consider.

As far as that program you mentioned that “puts a tracking cookie on the visitors computer even if they don’t click on the link” – stay far away from that one.

That is known as cookie stuffing, and it’s a big taboo. By doing that sort of thing, you’re no better than the thieves you’re trying to beat in the first place.

{ 30 comments }

Rod February 6, 2009 at 7:43 pm

Is it possible to cloak a link on one of my blogs from blogger.com or can you oly do cloaking if you have your own hosting service?

I also have a Clickbank product I want to promote on my blog is it also possible when a person clicks on my affiliate link to have them bypass the clickbank merchants sale page and go directly to the clickbank purchase page.

Please help thanks

Shawn Collins February 6, 2009 at 9:05 pm

Sure, just use a free URL shortening service like http://www.cli.gs

Rod February 6, 2009 at 9:35 pm

okay so that cloaks my link on my page but what about the person who is buying……. will my affiliate id show up in their address bar when they click on this link. also is there a way to bypass the affiliate sales page and send my customers directly to the purchase page just incase the sales page is poorly designed?

philip townsend August 19, 2008 at 7:34 am

Hi Shawn
When i do a search for our website on google it shows as index.html in the main header for the site how do i change this to show op-biz

Shawn Collins July 20, 2008 at 2:20 pm

Nice patronizing comment when I’ve patiently tried to explain the creation of .htaccess redirects.

> The whole idea of link cloaking is to make sure that the person browsing and using your affiliate links doesn’t actually get to see the affiliate link ID.

That may be what you want to do, and if that’s the case, use a frame.

But that’s not the “whole idea” and it’s not at all why I do it.

I create redirects to cloak links from ad blockers.

I also make the redirects to shorten links.

Have a nice day.

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