The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

If you’re an affiliate, it’s a good idea to cloak or redirect your links before sending the visitor to the merchant’s website.

For example, let’s assume you want to promote a merchant that sells diapers. They may give you a link that looks like this:

http://www.diapers.com/affiliateid=123

With a link cloaking script, your link looks more like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/diapers

If you put this link on your website and your visitor hovers over the link, they will clearly see that you are redirecting them to another site, and if they are smart, they may notice you are using an affiliate link, which means you have a bias towards promoting the product.

Here are a few good reasons for using an affiliate cloaking (ie. php redirect) script:

• The visitor see’s your link as “scrappybusiness.com/recommends/product” instead of a long URL from the merchant.
• The visitor may be weary of clicking on affiliate links, and redirecting your link makes your appear like a non-affiliate link.
• You get tracking stats for each affiliate link that allows you to see which affiliate links are being clicked
• Some search engines may penalize affiliate heavy websites, and redirecting your link may benefit you for natural SEO rankings and PPC Quality Score (although this is not tested or proven — most likely the search engines will eventually figure it out)
• It’s an easy way to update an affiliate link through a web interface, instead of having to change all the URL’s which point to the link.

Most affiliate link cloakers cost $49+ (BLAH!). However, here is a quality affiliate link redirect script for free.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.