How to Cloak Affiliate Links (and Why You Should)

[djbaxter]

How to Cloak Affiliate Links (and Why You Should)
by SugarRae, SugarRae.com
May 3, 2016

I always run my affiliate links through redirects – also referred to as cloaking affiliate links – for several reasons:

• Running them through my redirects means I have a click count to match up to the one the merchant is reporting.
• Affiliate links are usually ugly and impossible to remember without doing a copy/paste. Redirects allow you to create short, memorable URLS for them and allow you to access commonly used affiliate links from memory.
• If you’re in an industry where you market to other affiliates, it can help prevent folks from switching out your affiliate ID with theirs.
• If the merchant decides to change networks or linking methods, you can edit a single redirect instead of needing to edit every instance in which you linked to them throughout your entire site.
• If you decide to change which merchant you’re using to promote a product, you can edit one redirect instead of needing to edit every instance in which you linked to them throughout your entire site.
• If a handful of the merchants I mention on a regular basis don’t have affiliate programs, I’ll often still cloak the link to their main website. This way, if they ever do launch an affiliate program, I can affiliate all my previous links to them by updating the one cloaked link.
• If you’re running an affiliate datafeed site, anything you can do to make your site more technically unique than the other 4000 affiliates using the same datafeed is a bonus in regards to affiliate datafeed SEO.

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[jonathan petrou]

I've always used TidyURL - FREE URL redirection, cloaking and social sharing service. to shorten my affiliate links.
It's a good tool to save, organize and share their your links.

Jonathan

The life you want

 

[Reolink]

Thx for the tips on cloaking affiliate links.

 

[awalaravind]

Thanks for the tips.

 

[Quanghung]

thanks for the helpful information