Cloaking Affiliate Links
July 9, 2008
If you plan on maximizing your affiliate earnings, you will have to take the extra time to manually cloak your affiliate links. Affiliate links are usually very long or strange looking, making them less inviting to clicks. Most internet users will click on a affiliate link, but there are some visitors that are less likely to click on it. If you have a review site, you will quickly turn off a visitor if every review has a nice little referral link at the end of it. Webmaster or affiliate orientated sites, should especially have all of their affiliate links cloaked because the visitors are more web saavy and even less likely to click on affiliate links.
Affiliate networks like Commission Junction (CJ) and ClixGalore, can do the cloaking of the link automatically. They use a mouseover javascript command to display the real normal url form instead of a affiliate link, when a user hovers their mouse over the link. In Internet Explorer the CJ link works correctly in cloaking the real url, but the Clixgalore link provides a blank. In Opera, Firefox, and Netscape browsers, the CJ and Clixgalore cloaked link both are shown as the full affiliate link, not something we want. Linkconnector affiliate network does the best cloaking automatically, with their special “naked url technology”. They make the links look normal in all browsers, but unfortunately linkconnector is a small affiliate network with not many affiliate programs. Another option is using a free online url shortening service such as Tinyurl, but those links look strange (ex: tinyurl.com/gn25vsa) and might even be more likely to turn off a user from clicking.
The best alternative is to do the cloaking yourself. One way you can do it is through redirects with the htaccess file. The problem with this is you need a real web host and it only works on certain web server configurations. You can also do html redirects, which make the link look like another page on the site. Although, you wind up creating many html pages, for each affiliate link, I find it encourages clicks because each link has a .html extension at the end. This usually makes them think it’s another page in your site.
To implement it, create a html page with the following code, replacing the example.com url with your affiliate link.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.example.com”>
</HEAD>
</HTML>
So if you have a affiliate site named Express you can name the html redirecting page as Express.html and then on your site the link will be http://www.yoursite.com/Express.html instead of the affiliate link. This url looks a lot nicer than an affiliate link and it looks like it could be another page on your own site! When a user clicks on the link within a couple seconds, they will automatically be taken to the affiliate page.
Make sure you add a nofollow tag to the link to your html redirect page, as search engines don’t really like html redirects. Also, it is important to make sure your affiliate network merchant allows redirects. In Commission Junction it has to explicitly say that in the section where you cut n paste the ad code. URL redirects work ok for all Shareasale and Clixgalore merchants, just make sure you don’t change the image tag in the Clixgalore or Commission Junction code because that tracks impressions for their fraud detection system.
