Cloaking Affiliate Links

When you come across an affiliate link for the first time you don’t really know whats on the other end, and that your being sold some sort of product or service. Then as time goes by you start to become more and more aware of affiliate links and if your like me, you avoid them like the plague. The solution you may ask? Cloaking!

If you want to cloak your affiliates links its actually pretty easy. There’s numerous ways to do so, but if you are on a budget like me, then you wont want to spend out of pocket large amount of money. So I am gonna show you a uniquely simplistic way to hide your links, without using and backend coding.

Hide your Affiliate Links

Besides making your landing page a better sell , your surfers are way more susceptible   to click through and convert on affiliate link when they distincly think that its legit and totally unbiased. The trust is broken when the link ends up showing up as an affiliate link.

Which would you click through?
www.google.com/?ref=LorneFade2884 or www.google.com ?

You have no idea where that ref link points to, and the fact that it could be some NSFW content or something malicious is hardly worth your suspicion.

Cloak Them!

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/targeturl” target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.displaythisname.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>Your Site</a>
<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/1.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″/>

So just take the code above, fill in your affiliate link and then fill in the link you would like to show your users, they wont know the difference. There are other methods including javascript redirects and the like, however for the time it takes I feel that this method is an absolute must for any webmaster who was unaware.