"Most of our links are run through our own custom redirector for the purpose of tracking clicks."
custom here too, for tracking and for ease of programming (ie deep linking).
i do think today's first tier search engines can sniff right past cloaking when determining if a site is an affiliate site, so i'd add bunk to that category of yours as well. robots may stop crawling your domain's specific redirectors / links, but it doesn't always stop detecting and understanding them.
in addition, some unethical affiliates have other reasons for cloaking links, almost always obfuscation being practiced to more easily avoid detection of practices like dtm ppc poaching or cookie stuffing.
thanks for saying what you did about software, i completely agree!
Hey Pat.
While I think that Search Engines can certainly follow masked links if they want, I find that if they're blocked in robots.txt, they don't.
I think they've got better things to do, and in fact, I don't even think masking affiliate links is necessary. A site is either useful or it isn't. The presence of affiliate links has no bearing on that, and I think they believe that.
People who think their site got killed because simply there are affiliate links there are probably kidding themselves as to the real reason.
We completely agree on your paragraphs 2 & 3. On paragraph 1, yes, robots stops the (well behaved) crawlers from following the links, as I said before. No compelling need to argue the finer points of crawl blocking versus algorithmic link destination detection with you, the other paragraohs make it moot for a discussion between us. But by leaving it looking like it's an effective hiding technique (it isn't!), I think your readers are done a disservice, although a microscopic one.
I usually use affiliate marketing as my main source of income and I have to say I earn way much more when I use cloakers. I don't too much like the free ones because you never know when the webmaster and their website will fold, but I like subdomain cloaks better because they are harder to detect. The free online look unprofessional and most sites have already banned them.
There are many website which cloak their links in order to provide privacy for their user. Many people do say that cloak link is unethical, but in some cases it is highly beneficial. To me cloak link is bad because it generates a lot of spamming and in some cases it works like fraud activity. Thanks
Yes, my company always uses link cloaking. We do it most of the time for hiding our affiliate links but also out of habit sometimes.
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I really like this post because I have been wondering the best way to go about hiding links. I currently use a php redirect to do it but I'm not sure if there is a better way.
I'm looking forward to hearing more about the subject and am not quite sure how to track it either as I'm kind of new to this stuff.
I just don't want to look unprofessional with a million affiliate links all over the place. Thanks again for the post.
Michael J Ottman
There are many website which cloak their links in order to provide privacy for their user, I am currently building a website and I’m new to this. I kept seeing people write do not cloak on your website, I’d say the main reason for cloaking is to prettify messy links, Many people do say that cloak link is unethical, but in some cases it is highly beneficial.
Nice post. I do have a question though. Is there opensource software to run those short url sites? I mean if I want to run my own short url service.
This is an extra step I haven't implemented or even considered. I used just nofollow to avoid passing any link juice to my affiliate sites, but I did learn about my competitors networks from their outbound links and joined them. Not sure how savvy most shoppers are to know whether a link goes to an affiliate site or not.
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What is Link Cloaking?
Link Cloaking is the technical practice of hiding an actual URL through a link on the local domain, or a through a benign third party domain.
URL shorteners, which we've all become so familiar with thanks to services like Twitter, is probably the most commonly seen link cloaking. When you use a service like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, etc., you're technically cloaking links.
Why Would You Want to Cloak Links?
Most people use URL shorteners so that they simply make long URLs more manageable. If you've got a big long URL to a product on an ecommerce website and you want to put it in an email, a nice short URL that redirects to it is much easier to manage. URL shorteners become mandatory when using a service like Twitter where you've only got a very small number of characters to write a message.
Affiliate Marketing is sort of a special case where there are several other reasons that people want to cloak their affiliate links.
How do you cloak affiliate links?
If you're just cloaking a single link, the easiest thing to do is use a URL shortening service. TinyURL is the first service like this, but it has been overtaken by newer services fueled by the high demand for these services fueled by twitter. There are many, many services that add great features like custom URLs, click stats, header frames, etc.
If you're routinely cloaking links on your own websites, you're probably going to want to either set up a procedure on your own server, or even do something to automate this.
You can set up redirects manually in your .htaccess file, get a redirector or cloaking Wordpress plugin (if you're using Wordpress), get a third party URL shortener that you can host on your own server (like Shorty), or build something custom.
Most of our links are run through our own custom redirector for the purpose of tracking clicks. This has the secondary benefit of cloaking the link as well.
The technical details on how to cloak links is too much for this post, but I'll follow up with a post on a few methods of cloaking that you can easily do yourself.