WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin

WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugins – I don’t use them!

If you are an affiliate marketer then I don’t need to tell you how important it is to cloak your affiliate links. Nothing worse than doing a pile of work to find someone has hijacked your links and you are not getting paid. The solution to link hijacking is link cloaking.

The WordPress community has created a ton of plugins for link cloaking. If you are interested in a free wordpress link cloaker plugin then here’s a few to check out:

I think I’ve tried all the free versions and purchased a number of the paid ones like:

and, of course, there are others that I’ve left out

I don’t use any of them anymore. They are all laying dormant on my hard drive now.

Why?

The problem with a WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaker plugin is that they are only really useful if you have a couple of sites. This means it’s easy enough to log in to each site and add the link you wish to be cloaked or edit it.

I have more than "a couple of sites" and that’s where the problem is. I don’t want to spend all day logging into each site to add a link or editing a link. When an affiliate program changes I have to do extra work by running around all sites editing links. Not only that, I also have to remember which site is promoting the particular program. With a couple of sites this is not going to be a problem – with lots of sites this is a headache I could do without. Personally, I would prefer to spend my time sipping cocktails

The other problem with using a wordpress plugin to cloak your affiliate links is that it only works with WordPress. As much as I love my WP there are times when you need to act outside of WP and this is one of them (for me anyway). If you are a writer, like me, then a plugin is not much use to cloak affiliate links in your ebook

In order to save time it’s much easier for me to use a domain redirect as an affiliate link cloaker. That means I have one domain and then I just add my links to it. You can do this manually just in your web hosting panel but I prefer to use a script for this task.

Using a script to cloak my affiliate links means that I now only have one place to go to add links, edit them and delete them. I can use the cloaked links on my wordpress sites and in my ebooks so it is multi purpose which saves duplicating work and frees up time in my life.

The script that I like is called Easy Redirect Script and it really is easy. What I like about is that the interface is clear, there is no clutter and no way to get confused.

easy redirect script

You just add your link add where you want it to be redirected to and that’s it. Done. You can also view your links and edit them from the handy admin panel.

It’s been an expensive and time consuming exercise deciding not to use a WordPress link cloaking plugin but for me the domain redirects or using a simple script like Easy Link Cloak is the best solution for managing multiple sites and products.

By the way, if you purchase the link cloaker plugins or script through my links then I will get a small commission. It won’t be enough to retire to a beach but I may get a few cups of coffee out of it

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Readers' Comments

Nice article, very helpfull.

smarty on November 19th, 2009 at 17:03
Minor clarification request. If I convert an affiliate link to a Bit.ly link, would this be adequate to prevent an affiliate link thief from stealing my aff commissions or is a redirect the only safe way to go?

Ferree Money on November 29th, 2009 at 18:03
Sure you can convert a link with Bit.ly but all you are doing is converting not saving time when the links change. So, for example, if I need to change an affiliate link in my 950 page book if I was using Bit.ly I’d convert the new link then I would have to send out the book again to all customers to ensure they were clicking the right link! Now, I wouldn’t do that because it’s not fair to my customers. If i’m using a redirect script I don’t touch the book at all, I just change the link so no need to fiddle with the book or send it out again.

Also with websites say I have a lot of WordPress news sites and I change one affiliate link banner that I use on all of them, if I use bitly I have to go to each and every site …..If I use a redirect script I don’t need to go to any sites – just change it once in my admin panel and I’m done.

Hope that helps

admin on November 29th, 2009 at 20:11
Your idea no makes sense at all. The proccess to hidden links are used to:

1 – Hide the affiliate link;
2 – Your visitor must believe that the link is “from inside”, so you must work these redirections at every single domain. If you have 50 projects, you have to create different links to each one of them;

If I want just change the link to another domain, or make it shorter is very easy to use a service like bit.ly.

I hope you change your mind soon.

Jay on June 14th, 2010 at 5:47
If you have one site using a service like bit.ly will be easy for you. If you have hundreds of sites that you have to log into and edit the affiliate links on you’ll have a headache. More importantly, if you have an ebook and one of the affiliate link changes do you go back, edit the ebook and then send out the new download to everyone each time an affiliate link changes? Don’t think you’ll have many happy customers if you do that. However, if you use an affiliate script like I use I can change the affiliate link without editing the book or the site which is a huge time saver.

admin on June 15th, 2010 at 0:51
Centralised management of your affiiliate links makes a LOT of sense – especially as the number of sites and links you maintain starts to grow.

If you particularly want your links to appear as if they are “from inside”, then simply create the appropriate “internal” page and redirect it to your affiliate link redirection script.

Following Leanne’s example above, if she was to promote a product called ABC Link Cloaker from this site, this would look like:

1. wpqueen.com/abclinkcloaker would be the displayed link.
2. This would redirect to http://www.y5y.info/abclinkcloacker.
3. This would in turn redirect to the appropriate affiliate link.

Still only one place to update if the end affiliate link changes (not every site Leanne might promote it from) – just requires one extra page to be created on the site with a small piece of redirection code.

One caveat here – some affiliate links redirect a number of times before landing on the target site. Many browsers limit the number of redirections allowed before they treat the link as spam and refuse to load the page. This one additional redirection MAY (in a small number of cases) be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You will need to test to make sure this does not happen for you.

Warren on June 18th, 2010 at 5:42
Thank you for those plugins…

I found you on Google’s search result :d

Ghufron on July 7th, 2010 at 20:40
I most definitely use a link cloaking device on my sites. I actually used the free version of pretty link pro then bought the pro version. This plugin doe exactly what you want…it creates a 301 redirect of your affiliate link. This is great because people think that your link is on your domain and wont be scared to click on it. Plus there is an option to automatically change keywords into no-follow links to your affiliate. Now it can’t get much easier then this…

And for the issue with it only working with wordpress, you can export all your redirects onto an excel file in case you want to switch to another platform or to straight CSS + HTML.

Anyway, I do agree that a lot of people probably spend too much time worrying about this rather then doing something more productive such as adding new content to their site.

But if you really want to get simple, why not add your re-directs through the .htaccess file? Did you buy a whole other domain for your affiliate re-directs? If so why?
AJ recently posted..Rejuvenate WordPress Theme

AJ on July 13th, 2010 at 16:23
@AJ I have hundreds of domain names so I don’t need to worry about buying one for one purpose. If I add through a ht access file I don’t have the benefit that the script gives me of being able to sort things by categories and track them.

admin on July 18th, 2010 at 1:11