Should you Hide Affiliate Links? How to Mask Affiliate Links

[Linda Buquet]

Great Post from Michael Gray at Graywolf.

<a href="http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/">How to Mask Affiliate Links</a>

How to mask affiliate links is one of the most common questions new affiliates often ask. In this post, we will take a look at the hows and whys of why you should mask affiliate links and how to do it effectively, with an eye towards maintaining long term low maintenance.

Should I Mask My Affiliate Links

This is one of the first questions people who start adding affiliate links have to deal with. As with most things in internet marketing, it depends. If the website is primarily a hobby website, not a money making or a business site, then the answer is no, you don?t need to mask affiliate links. However, what often happens is that people start with a hobby website, build nice traffic, and then look for ways to monetize it. I can?t tell you the number of hobby websites I?ve seen turn into $1,000 dollar a month sites. So, unless you are 100% positive it?s never going to turn into a money website, it?s better to be safe than sorry. Do it right and mask affiliate links right from the beginning.

 

[AllanJames]

Must admit I'm guilty of not following this good advice in that in a couple of my 'general' niches I haven't bothered. But in the Internet Marketing - Make Money niche I always do.

Have you noticed that some savvy vendors now are arranging things so that your affiliate ID doesn't show in the browser when you arrive at the sales page? - instead you just see the website address It's a step in right direction but IMO cloaking is still worthwhile.

On top of that there are several WP plugins that cloak AND track clicks - the one I use is called PrettyLinks

 

[joseph1]

I also use pretty link because it's so simple. but you
have to be careful how you cloak your links because
Amazon has been banning marketers with cloaked
links.

It turns out that the program that they were
using to cloak their links uses I frames and that is
against Amazons TOS.

-Joseph

 

[iso2009]

I will talk about another "masking" for affiliate links.

I would mask it for SEO purposes, for example when you have more thant one site in the top 10 results. From my experience (I might be wrong, though) Google will give you a penalty sooner or later, because getting into top ten with 4 sites (for example) is clearly something they do not like.
However, I am pretty sure Google follows all "un-follow" and "do not index" links anyway, so masking the code (for search engines) might be pretty useless.

 

[WebReviews]

Yeah I agree with masking affiate links for a number of different reasons.
As iso2009 said, for SEO purposes would be my main reason, but also masked affilate links look at tidyer...

 

[lets4410]

Does it really matter to the buyer if the links hidden or not?
I would of thought that their mind is more on the product they are going to get instead of who, if anyone is getting a commission.