Best way to hide affiliate links?

[Seamaster]

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I hear that Google doesnt like sites with affiliate links on and some users don't like clicking on affiliate referral links.

I've been looking at the way you can hide or mark where you links are linking to but am not sure which approach to take.

What do other people do or do you not do it at all?

This one looks the best so far but is there anything better?
PHP Affiliate Jump Script - How to create an Affiliate Link jump script in PHP

Thanks.

[Barry]

If you have php on your server and your only managing a few links then thats an ideal script for you to start off with.

Ta

Baz

[jonsimmonds]

I do the following

edit robots.txt and include this line

User-agent: * (this line is probably not really needed in most cases)
Disallow: /aff-links/

then in .htaccess use this for links

Redirect 301 /aff-links/companyA http://www.companya.com/index.php?a=12345
Redirect 301 /aff-links/companyB http://www.companyb.com/index.php?a=56789

Then simply use http://www.yourdomain.com/aff-links/companyA as the url for the affiliate links

Just make sure that the directory you choose to use is not in use on your site, usefull to if a affiliate program goes down, it allows you to change all outgoing links with one click, then you can set about editing content to reflect the changes you made later on

[ContentBoss]

that's good advice. It will also help cut down on link hijacking by adware/spyware

[kickflip]

I do it like this: redirect script

It's pretty much the same as the mehtod your looking at but also shows how to prevent your aff links being followed by Google using robots.txt

[Keith]

Quite a while back I wrote about various methods http://www.keithbond.co.uk/redirecti...filiate-links/

However these days most of my sites are based on wordpress so I use this ø Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com ø which I believe I discovered in a thread on a4u many thanks to whoever posted it in the first place.

[Leeky]

We have a service which redirects affiliate links and doesn't require you to build any affiliate links at all and you can use your own domain name..

e.g. http://go.pagerank10.co.uk/specialoffers/pcworld.html

You just point a sub domain to our ip address, login to a control panel and enter your affiliate id's and select the merchants your approved for (or just select all merchants)

http://www.icodes.co.uk/easylink/register.php

Also with the above account you can also use our special offers containing your affiliate id's with your website.

Lee

[Seamaster]

Thanks everyone.

Am going to with this one for now:

I do it like this: redirect script

It's pretty much the same as the mehtod your looking at but also shows how to prevent your aff links being followed by Google using robots.txt

[Mike_M]

Is link cloaking worth doing on a wordpress blog? I have a site that does ok without it but now I'm thinking the site could be doing much better.

Is it legal or would google ban you if they found out?

[Seamaster]

Is link cloaking worth doing on a wordpress blog? I have a site that does ok without it but now I'm thinking the site could be doing much better.

Is it legal or would google ban you if they found out?

I think there is a Wordpress plugin to do this. Not sure if its allowed or not though?

[chic_nicola]

I've just downloaded the plugin Keith reccommended above - it's really easy, certainly the best one I've come across.

[stepper]

Personally I used to find the mod rewrite approach the best so you could craft nice looking URLs in place of your affiliate links, but found it difficult to maintain so many redirects, especially when segmenting the traffic, using tracking IDs etc.

Our approach at Skimlinks is to not mask or cloak links, but to encourage publishers to use normal links i.e.

<a href="http://www.retailer.com/product">http://www.retailer.com/product</a>

, and if you are running the Skimlinks code on your site, the link is converted to an affiliate link when someone clicks on it (on-the-fly)

the main benefits of this approach are:
1 - the link looks unadulterated - you don't need to use javascript to mask the link in the status bar (some browsers don't let you alter the status bar anymore)
2 - it maintains the perceived SEO benefits of using natural links in your code instead of affiliate links.
3 - you don't have to maintain a redirect script and update it when your affiliate links change.

cheers,
Joe

[Mike_M]

I think there is a Wordpress plugin to do this. Not sure if its allowed or not though?

Keith mentioned it in one of his earlier posts.

Does anyone know whether link cloaking (eg using this wordpress plugin) could theoretically get you a google ban, or is it safe to use and legit?