Lately around the web, I hear many affiliates talking about link cloaking, mainly for two reasons.

First, affiliates are trying to hide their affiliate links from being identified by software like Affiliate Elite.

Secondly, I often hear cloaking mentioned when affiliates want to hide affiliate links from search engine spiders.  The perception is that search engine spiders flag affiliates hurting their organic search results.

Are these reasons justified?  Sure they are! 

Everyday markets are getting more competitive and the search engines aren’t exactly overjoyed with affiliates.

If you want to prevent users from visually seeing your affiliate links you can do it FREE with the below method.

  1. Visit http://tokira.net/unicode/ and convert your affiliate link to Unicode.
  2. At http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/affiliate_link_cloaker.htm under the section called “How Can I Do It For Free” (scroll down the page) copy the Model Page code.
  3. Next paste the copied code into a blank html, htm or php file.
  4. After pasting the code change the section labeled “–TITLE’–” to whatever title you want for your page as James
    describes.
  5. Next in the file put the Unicode affiliate URL (from step 1 above) in place of –URL– in the code as James describes.
  6. Save your file and name it anything you want.  For this example I will use the file name “superaffilate.html”.  Note your  file can be any name, but it is a good idea to make it relevant to your affiliate offer.
  7. Next, you need a directory on your server to store the file you created.  I suggest you create a special directory instead of putting the file at the root.  For instance, you could name the directory, “recommends” or whatever you like.
  8. Upload your file (i.e. superaffiliate.html) to the directory you created.
  9. Next on your affiliate landing page you will need to link to the file you created which will lead your visitors to your
    affiliate partner’s site.  To accomplish this simply create a link to your file  (i.e. <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/recommends/superaffiliate.html” rel=”nofollow”>Super Affiliate Profits</a>) on your affiliate landing page. 

If you want to block spiders from following the link make sure you use the rel=”nofollow” feature as I have above.

If you are using the link in email you can just place the direct link (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/recommends/superaffiliate.html)

That is it.  It looks like a lot with 9 steps, but it can actually be done in about 3 to 5 minutes.

With this method your affiliate links will be completely hidden visually.  You can even use the affiliate link in email marketing and .pdf ebooks and it will be hidden.

If you want to try to prevent the search engine spider from reading your html file that includes your true affiliate link (in my example superaffiliate.html) you can block the spiders with a disallow in your robots.txt. 

Since we put this file in a special directory (in my example recommends directory) you simply block access to this whole directory via robots.txt.  In the future this can be the directory you house all your affiliate links in.

If you do not know how to block your directory via robots.txt, it is easy.  Just create a text file in notepad called robots.txt and paste the below into it:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /yourdirectoryname/

Change the yourdirectoryname with the name of the directory on your server where your affiliate file is located (i.e in my example it would be the recommends directory). Then upload the robots.txt file to the root directory on your web server.

Once you get the hang of this it is nowhere as bad as it looks. 

Good luck.

Share This