Creating cloaked links
Guys, I have reached a crossroad on doing my website and I really would love all your opinion. I recently came into conclusion that having to put a hyperlink in which when a visitor hovers his/her mouse pointer on it, he/she can still see the affiliate link on the lower left side of the screen. It is a feature that all browsers do have to let you know where you will be heading when you click that hyperlink.
Then, I did a little research and found out that you can actually cloak your affiliate links to show a different link below. For example, the hyperlink shows that when you hover on it, it will open up a URL like this, http://www.yourdomain.com/(randomnumber), but when you actually click it, it send you into a different site which is your affiliate link like this, http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/affiliateID.
My question is, does this cloaking WHATSAMAYCALLIT thing destroy the reputation and trustworthiness of your site? Thanks for answering my query.
Recent Comments
3
personally I'd prefer to see where a link is taking me than to think I'm going one place and actually be sent somewhere else. To me it seems deceitful.
why try to cloak your link?
I think people cloak for fear that someone may steal their affiliate ID which, according to Kyle, is not something that can be done. I don't know enough about affiliate links to know if this is a valid concern or not.
So, there could be two things at play here...cloaking for fear of link stealing, or cloaking to hide where you are sending a visitor.
If the reason is the latter, why bother? As soon as they click the link they are going to see where they were sent and you'll lose credibility if you are sending them somewhere that has nothing to do with your site's content. If you're sending them somewhere that's helpful to them why would you need to cloak your link in the first place?
Hopefully I've understood your concern and my "two cents" offers something helpful.
thanks dopamine,
i did thought about that. it's a bit misleading and don't really make any difference. Though my idea is just to reflect something similar but does not necessarily be the affiliate link.
Like for example:
Your hyperlink is leading to an affiliate site
e.g. http://affiliatelink.com/yourID,
but when a visitor hovers his/her pointer on the hyperlink, he/she just sees http://affiliatelink.com without the yourID or what we call affiliate link ID.
This in its present state is actually not misleading, but can give the visitor the idea that you are not trying to make money out of it. Because many people already knows about affiliate links which in my opinion, people avoid them affiliate links.
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i use pretty link
I use temporary 307
I do not click NO FOLLOW
I click TRACKING enabled
I "change the link name" to something like...
welfyfillyates.com/"signupundermeIwillseeuinside
then
that is what a visitor sees, it's honest, it's transparent (it says what u r going to go to)
and when the visitor gets to that link destination, they see within milliseconds that...
"yes, that's right! this is the place i wanted to be led to"
So, it helps with level of trust...
Cloaking links/renaming links/shortening links? I'm kinda getting confused now.
lol
is it all the same thing or 3 different things? or two things? or are there any more things that tie in with those three things?
haha
Jimbo