Comments on: Cloaking & Ranking Your Affiliate Links

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:57:34 +0000

I realize this post is a few years old but won’t the search engines penalize you for having redirecting pages that are indexed?

By: FitLine

FitLine — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:33:11 +0000

Used it, works great.

Thanks for sharing, Stuart

By: Tarik

Tarik — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:02:46 +0000

Great post, Stuart. I had to play around with the array function to get it working, but it’s still a very useful script.

Creating a separate file for each link is tedious and a pain in the you know what. Please provide more PHP tutorials on how to save time dealing with links, scripts, and functions.

By: Is link cloaking really necessary?

Is link cloaking really necessary? — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:10:16 +0000

[...] Re: Is link cloaking really necessary? There are services that offer cloak Here is a link to self help Cloaking & Ranking Your Affiliate Links [...]

By: Over Use and Misuse of “Bleeding Page Rank” | Big Foot Web Marketing

Wed, 28 May 2008 15:27:34 +0000

[...] Examples of Bleeding Page Rank – you link out out to Wordpress.com in your sidebar on every single page of your site.(and if you have not changed your sidebar or meta information in wordpress theme files then you probably do) – Payment information links and security links in footer. Most online shopping sites will have payment info in their sidebars- links going out to major credit cards, Paypal, hacker safe sites, etc. You maybe have 4 or 5 sites in your footer that linkout sitewide. Add nofollow tags to these or better yet have them link to a “payment option” type page in your site that list your payment types and those links can link out. – Affiliate Marketing Ads in sidebar. This is great for affiliates not so great for the site owner. If you have plastered you sidebar with affiliate ads and links- take a close look. You might be linking back to all those sites and oozing your page rank needlessly. Add nofollows to these or consider cloaking your affiliate links. [...]

By: gm

gm — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:04:11 +0000

You can also use a 100% frame with the aff link as the target url. This way their page loads and the url in the address bar doesn’t change for the user. You can get a little more sophisticated and do a php script with a switch statement (or pull the links from a db) which writes the frame and selects whatever url. Advantage of this is that it will pass your site as the referrer. Using PHP you only need to write 1 script with all your urls vs 1 script/html page for every link….

By: ram

ram — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:11:26 +0000

can we use that php links method in normal satic html website ,

or i have to use .httacess

which is better

By: John C.

John C. — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:00:12 +0000

Referer is not passed with php redirect.

By: The Grumpy Old Chef

The Grumpy Old Chef — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:30:16 +0000

Nice post, Stuart.

It’s always a worry if you are going to get your commissions or not.

No problems now – looks good too.

Thanks.

By: Amit Nyamtabad

Amit Nyamtabad — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:20:22 +0000

Yes I agree that the link can also get indexed by this method !

By: Affiliate Link Cloaking: Free Tools, Tutorials & Discussions by TimeForBlogging

Tue, 01 May 2007 16:40:52 +0000

[...] the famous infamous John Chow gave a primer on hiding affiliate links. Another good post, called Cloaking and Ranking Your Affiliate Links can be found over at the Earner’s Blog. This post discusses one technique in particular that [...]

By: Idle Profit - The Great Internet Earnings Experiment » Earnersblog Review

Idle Profit - The Great Internet Earnings Experiment » Earnersblog Review — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:32:38 +0000

[...] first article that I read on Earnersblog that hooked me was called â€œCloaking & Ranking Your Affiliate Linksâ€. Iâ€™ll give you three guesses as to what the article is about. Itâ€™s a great article with a [...]

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:27:12 +0000

Thing is though Ben, we “want” the links to get indexed, that way we can rank them & hopefully get organic traffic straight through the link.

By: Ben Cruikshank

Ben Cruikshank — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:24:55 +0000

This is a great idea, Stuart, and something I was going to look into doing. Another good thing to do in addition to this is to add this script into your robots.txt file so that it doesn’t get indexed.

By: Dominic

Dominic — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:04:50 +0000

I use the .htaccess file for this. Are there extra benefits doing it this way?

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:56:47 +0000

There’s no reason why this shouldn’t pass the referrer….

Are you using Zonealarm or anything similar Rafael?

By: Jason Pedersen

Jason Pedersen — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:17:42 +0000

I’m giving it a try. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks again Stuart.

By: Jason Pedersen

Jason Pedersen — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 18:56:25 +0000

I suppose another nice thing about it is that you can track how many people are clicking that link and then check to see if people are signing up. It could tell you that maybe you need to do a better job selling the affiliate.

By: Rafael

Rafael — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 15:57:08 +0000

I`ve just setup a similar redirect on a couple of sites and just realized this does not pass the referrer.
I`ve been looking on ways to do this since it`s kind of important for some of my stats, but I`ve had no luck.
Does anyone know how to do this?

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 10:41:24 +0000

Nice Xfiver you’ve actually picked up on something I was going to touch on in a later post

By: xfiver

xfiver — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 07:25:38 +0000

There is even a cooler method, with mod_rewrite. Basically, you have an .htaccess with rules that redirect URLS. So e.g. you have URL http://www.earnersblog.com/afflink
then in your .htaccess you setup a rule that /afflink will be redirected. If you code a PHP script that that has a nice interface and co do this then this is they way to go.
Clean, SEO friendly and nice

By: Edwin

Edwin — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 05:00:52 +0000

I never tried this beaucse the average consumer doens’t know anything about affiliate links in my opinion, but i maybe wrong.

By: Leonard

Leonard — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 02:37:12 +0000

Good post Stuart. Oh yeah, the good thing I like about this method is that when moused-over, the status bar also shows the redirected url.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:46:29 +0000

Not entirely sure since the TBPR hasn’t updated in a few months. I guess we’ll see come the next update

By: Jason Pedersen

Jason Pedersen — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:28:46 +0000

I’ve always wondered how you were doing this. Do any of your affiliate urls have any PR?