How To Cloak Your Affiliate Link
March 24, 2009 by Daniel
Cloaking your affiliate link has become important for many reasons. The most important reason for me is Google and the other search engines.
Google has changed their minds of what they like and what they don’t like. And one thing they don’t like anymore are affiliate links. It just seems that they don’t like it when other’s than Google it self are making money online 
and so they started to ban sites with affiliate links on them.
An example for that are the BANS (build a niche site) and PHPBay powered websites which are built around the ebay affiliate network. Brian Johnson over at netmarketingcourse.net has written a post and created a great video about “Google De Indexing BANS, PHPBay Sites“.
So this is reason enough for me to only display cloaked links since the most traffic I get to all my sites is coming from Google. And I’m sure, that this is also a good reason for you to start cloaking your affiliate links if you haven’t already.
Here are some different ways to cloak your affiliate link
There are many ways you can cloak your affiliate links. One of the easiest way in my oppinion is to create an HMTL page to redirect your visitors to the affiliate site. Below is the code you can use:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<meta content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″ http-equiv=”content-type”>
<title>Your Title</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”1; URL=http://www.affiliateurl.com”>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
You can copy that code into your notepad and save it as an .html file. You have to replace www.affiliateurl.com with your affiliate link and change the title. After you saved the file upload it to your web hosting account. Now you can link to that file and your visitors are getting redirected to the merchant’s site without showing Google that you used an affiliate link.
The same thing can be done using php instead of HTML. The code for that is:
<?php header(‘Location: http://www.youraffiliatelink.com’); exit(); ?>
Copy that code into your notepad and save it as a .php file. Then do the steps discribed above.
Now when you have a blog and promote many affiliate products that can give some headaches because you would have to create many files. An easier way to cloak links with your blog is by using a link cloaking plugin. Visit that site to learn more about it.
Another way to cloak your affiliate link is by using an online service like budurl.com. I’ve to appologize that I can’t give you any more information about that because I don’t use it and I never used one before. But as I heard it has some great features like tracking the clicks and so on. Visit budurl.com and learn more about it.
I hope this post was hepful and showed you the importance and some ways to cloak your affiliate links. If you have any questions about cloaking affiliate links just leave a comment and I’ll answer them.
Have a great day.
Daniel
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Learn exactly what you have to do to make certain that your application is accepted first time around 
I really enjoyed reading this blog I dont usually post but this time I will, have a very good day.
Great article…i will practice what you have done..TQ for share this
I knew a few people who were using BANS and were getting punted in the SERPs. Cloaking aff links didn’t work, so they just made a new BANS.
David’s last blog post..SEO Help
I am very happy to review this thanks for informative post.
Keep it up.
that’s a good idea because it’s always hard to tell what Google is up to!
I always wanted to know affiliate link. Thanks for sharing.
These methods of cloaking the links sure do appear to serve the purpose. It sounds like it is an appropriate action to take in order to keep the process going smoothly as viewer’s desires change.
I was not knowing that google banned those sites specially.
is it safe to cloak our affiliate link? i’m still confius about it
Thank you for the relevant information. I do it in my Templates website for the users don’t access the link without reference but now with this info I will do it in all my projects.
I have been using a similar cloaking the is a simple html redirect. Its works pretty good.
Great post.I was searching for some different ways to cloaking the affiliate link.This article is very useful for me.
Thanks for another great post. My cloaking is not working as well as I would like. I’ll have to use the information here. Thanks!
nice post but instead of that … think about internet security
I never knew how to do this so I just put in the regular affiliate links. This is great information to have and very valuable for those of us who did not know. Now, I can be a cloaker if I choose
Thanks!
Richard@How To Videos´s last blog ..How To Make Money On eBay
i don’t understand the cloaking actually. if users can follow a link and end up at ebay, then so can google. google doesn’t just record the text of a link, it’ll actually do the full http request and see where it ends up.
Great article…i will practice what you have done..TQ for share this tips. Very helpful
Gardasee´s last blog ..Unsere Empfehlungen
Thanks for the good info. Keep posting.
Thanks man, I was searching for something like this. Cloaking is a good thing.