I've seen numerous experienced IM folk say that link cloaking is imperative. I can set up cloaking with no problem, but I'm a little nervous about doing so. In the Webmaster Guidelines, Google is pretty emphatic about not using cloaking and redirects. I'd hate to have a site start making a little money only to be banned by Google. Any advice?
To Cloak or Not To Cloak
- Thread starter schizoman
- Start date
Cloaking (aka, redirecting) links is not a problem in and of itself.. you run into trouble if during the redirect you are doing funky things like stuffing cookies or serving different content to different users (bots vs real visitors)..
But a regular redirect Google could care less about and even support for tracking and analytics purposes. I even use them inside my Adwords Campaigns - redirects go through my scripts to capture data I need to track conversions etc.. but the have the bonus of hiding certain things in the url people could use to steal your conversions or, in the case of PPC, your campaign keywords etc..
What you do want to do though is being concious what type of link you are using to redirect on your websites or on the web in general.. if you want the link juice to flow, use 301s..
HTH!
But a regular redirect Google could care less about and even support for tracking and analytics purposes. I even use them inside my Adwords Campaigns - redirects go through my scripts to capture data I need to track conversions etc.. but the have the bonus of hiding certain things in the url people could use to steal your conversions or, in the case of PPC, your campaign keywords etc..
What you do want to do though is being concious what type of link you are using to redirect on your websites or on the web in general.. if you want the link juice to flow, use 301s..
HTH!
When trying to sell some kind of affiliate products to some 'smart people' and they hover their mouse over the link and discover it is an affiliate link, many of them wont click on it. Some would even prefer to copy out the original link of the product and paste it in their address bar than to go through your affiliate link, reason they do this i dont know. So it is better you cloak your affiliate links, this way you can be able to refer more people and make more sales. I've done this test before with my referal id on my site and my site didnt get any form of sanction from search engines, the only difference that i noticed was that i now had more visitors clicking on my affiliate links.
Here's a bit of good news. You hear a lot about cloaking but my experience over several years is that cloaking is only essential in the 'Make Money' / 'Internet Marketing' niches. In most other niches, relationships, weight loss etc etc it's far from necessary because these people don't know enough to know how to bypass your link.
To me, the more important thing is to be tracking all your links so that you know where you're getting your hits, and more importantly, subscription/sales from. Because of the importance of tracking I use a paid tracking service (not expensive) which just happens to cloak my links as well, thereby covering both bases.
Yes, that will mask your affiliate link - but only to one destination, and without the all important tracking.
Let's assume you, as I do, I have multiple Capture/Sales pages in a niche - even with my reasonable cash flow, 10 or more domains in an niche becomes expensive.
When you work in several niches it becomes prohibitive and that's why I recommend a good paid tracking service which includes cloaking of your affiliate link - better value for money, and the tracking helps you know what's going on.
Then there's the case when you need to do internal tracking - say you need to know not just the hits on any page, but the more important facts (ie. how many people actually subscribed or brought) then you need tracking to your subscription confirm/thankyou or download page.
You can't do any of this with domain forwarding.
The only comprehensive, and cost effective, method is a good tracking service.
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