Affiliate Link Cloaking – How To Protect Your Affiliate Links
Introduction: What is Affiliate Link Cloaking and How Does It Work?
Affiliate link cloaking is a technique used to protect affiliate links from being detected by search engine crawlers and scrapers. It is also used to protect affiliate links from being hijacked by scammers who want to steal your hard-earned commissions.
Most importantly though, your website visitors should not be able to see that by clicking on a link, they are being taken to an Affiliate Offer and off of the website they have visited, yours!
Another important goal of this technique is to prevent search engines from indexing the affiliate links on a webpage, which can lead to a lower click-through rate for the website. (SEO benefits)
How to Implement Affiliate Link Cloaking for Maximum Protection & Copy Protection
Affiliate link cloaking is a great way to protect your content from being stolen and to generate more revenue.
The best way to implement affiliate link cloaking for maximum protection and copy protection is by using a plugin like PrettyLinks.com if you have built your website using WordPress, which you definitely should.
Google loves WordPress sites (SEO benefits) and they are by far easy to build and work with. This plugin will take care of all the details for you, so you can focus on what matters most – your content!
I do recommend PrettyLinks but there are many others too. The free version works just fine.
How Do Pretty Links work?
Here’s an example: If your website domain is: www.MyWebsite.com the plugin will allow you to take your affiliate link and have it show on a page within your website and will look like: www.MyWebsite.com/find-out-more-here (or you can use a product name, etc).
How to Encode & Decode Affiliate Links
Affiliate links are a great way to monetize your blog. But you need to be careful about the way you present them.
A good affiliate link should not be apparent to the user. You want them to click on it without realizing that they are clicking on an affiliate link and not just a regular link within your website.
In order for the user not to know that they clicked on an affiliate link, you need to encode it with a URL encoding tool. A URL encoding tool is a website that takes any text input, encodes it, and then returns the encoded text as output.
Sites like Bitly.com, TinyURL.com, or Goo.gl can take care of this for you. This is really just shortening the original affiliate link but does work at masking the destination website.
Conclusion: Why You Should Be Using Affiliate Link Cloaking To Protect Your Business Today
Affiliate link cloaking is a process of protecting your affiliate links so that nobody can steal them and use them for their own purposes. This protects your business and ensures that you get the credit for any conversions that you generate.
It is never a good practice to send your visitors to a product you promote by using the network’s affiliate links directly. Always mask or cloak them for protection. You won’t be sorry by doing this and will only benefit.
