Is Link Tracking Is Worth It?
In one random wandering around the Web, I happened to visit a blog that says link cloaking as a black hat SEO strategy. Luckily, we have the WA Link Tracking that tracks our link and automatically cloaks them for us.
Just for you who don't know yet, 2011 and before cloaking is so difficult when you want to do it by yourself. You will need to create a folder that has a robots.txt for Google Bot to look at and a PHP script so users will be redirected to your affiliate page (e.g. Amazon/Clickank)
But with WA, that burdensome task became so easy and it was already available back in 2009. The problem that I figure out however is that every time I try to test my cloaked my-linker campaign links (You can navigation to your own link tracking in your left sidebar) is the speed. Having to process a script especially when using mobile phones will need a lot of bandwidth. Top to that this video of Matt Cutts:
http://www.worthofweb.com/blog/video-why-cloaking-is-so-bad/ blogged by worthofweb.com
What do you think? Are you still going to cloak your links?
P.S. The social sharing in the left side of the page above looked so cool so I try to figure what plugin is that. It's AddThis, you can visit the site here:
https://www.addthis.com, then follow the instruction for the Wordpress.org site..
To me, it's better than the ShareThis.
Recent Comments
2
Cloaking, tracking, and redirecting your links are all different things.
Tracking simply puts an ID on the link that allows you to see which links are clicked. There are also more advanced ways of tracking. It's for data analysis.
Redirecting, is going to be something like Pretty Link, or other URL shortener that makes your link look one way, but when a person lands on a page, they see the original, REAL url. It's a way to make your links more convenient.
Cloaking means that a person SEES one URL, but they are actually located at a different URL.
#1 and #2 are OK. #3 is NOT ok because it is deceiving the end user, telling them they are in one place, but they are actually in another.
That's a simple and great explanation. Can you please elaborate the process of redirecting?