Cloaking affiliate links

Hello everybody,

Yesterday I did a blog post on putting affiliate links into images,so today I am doing a post on how to cloak affiliate links

Since we are all here to learn about affiliate marketing, I think that understanding the make up and structure of affiliate links will become very important to us all. after all its how we are going to get paid in the end, so its worth having some in depth knowledge of all things about affiliate links.

There is of course an endless debate as to weather Google likes or loathes affiliate marketing and we could debate this forever, my own take on this is quite simple

I think Google has come to hate spammers and there are so many spammers in affiliate marketing that we all get tarred with the same brush, the fact that Google is the biggest affiliate marketing company in the world does not seem to matter to Google.

With that said, I personally think its worth cloaking your affiliate links as it hides them from Google and I have researched that affiliate links can sometimes give you a small mark against your site, so I cloak all mine

So what does cloaking links involve and what does it mean I hear you ask.

Ok, when you put an affiliate link on your site it creates its own HTML code, so when the Google spiders crawl your site they will see the links as affiliate links, so there is a way to change the code of the affiliate links and this is called Cloaking

Fortunately there is a great free plugin called - Pretty Link Lite - that takes makes this task easy

Above is a capture of what it looks like in your dashboard

Its very simple to use - You just take your original link and put it into the target URL box then in the pretty link box you just add a tracking code, the advantage of pretty links is that you may have many different links on your site and in the back end dashboard you get tracking stats so you can actually see what links or banners are getting you the most clicks and adjust your marketing campaign accordantly

Once you click create, it create a new link that will not show up as an affiliate link to the web spiders

There is a pro version but the free version is fine and its all you really need

Here is a capture of my click bank affiliate link before and after cloaking, as you can see it makes the link much smaller, tidier and much easier to use

This is what a pretty link looks like at the top, you then copy and past the link any where you want on you site and the plugin will track the clicks for you and you can see them at the back end of you dashboard

This is a screen shot of the statistics it provides its a very useful plugin and its 100% free so you might like to give it a try

Hope you enjoyed this little burst of Wordpress and marketing info

To all you success

Barry