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

By: admin

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:44:53 +0000

You have it pretty right Joe. For example, you could have the Easy Redirect Script on a domain called http://www.joelikes.com when you make a link for say a great wp plugin you link would look like http://www.joelikes.com/wpplugin when people click on that (or the anchor text) they bypass your http://www.joelikes.com domain and just go straight to the affiliate offer page. You could of course do the same thing with a service like bit.ly or any url shortener which is disguising your links. Just make sure that whatever you use that you are able to track clicks (so you know what is converting for you).

I like the redirect script because I can add links to it and include them on websites and in books etc, I have them all organized and categorized and if a recommendation or affiliate program changes I just change it at a central location and don’t need to change all the individual links in books/websites etc.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:01:07 +0000

No, I don’t worry about that at all A separate redirect from each site would be very time consuming much easier for you to have a domain like wpqueen/recommends and your 301 is in your “recommends” folder

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:34:56 +0000

So let me see if I have this 301 redirection stuff clear.

1. people come to my website and read a review of some product I’m promoting.

2. I use a product – like Easy Redirect Script -to make my affiliate link look more like my own website.

3. (The confusing part) The links that contain my affiliate links are really on pages of other websites (URLs) that I own. Those are the links that are 301 redirected to the products actual website (squeeze page etc).

3. When people click on my affiliate link, they dont even see my other website but instead are immediately redirected to the products website, hopefully to be converted (buy the product).

Do I have this right? Do I have the part about having to own other domain names correct? It would make sense in a way because if I make a page on my main website that contains nothing but a “buy the product link” it would show up to everybody on my RSS list as soon as I publish it right?

By: Buy my phone

Buy my phone — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:19:06 +0000

I’ve found the w-shadow.com one useful in the past but you’re correct that it is time-consuming to update outdated links.
Do you worry that your visitors notice that the link is not at the same domain? That was part of the reason that I use a separate redirect from each site…

By: JR

JR — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:27:47 +0000

I was just researching these plugins and dreading having to go and edit a hundred blogs that I have, this is a perfect solution, thank you!!!!

By: link cloaker

link cloaker — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:16:42 +0000

What the heck is link cloaking? To be as plain as possible, cloaking affiliate links is the art of showing your visitors an internal link when they mouse over an affiliate link so that the visitor doesn’t think they are leaving your site.

By: BrevilleJE900

BrevilleJE900 — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:50:51 +0000

I use the prettylink plugin and think it’s a really good plugin, but I will check out some of the other plugins you have listed to see if there are any better options.

By: admin

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:11:46 +0000

@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.

By: AJ

AJ — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:23:07 +0000

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?

By: Ghufron

Ghufron — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:40:23 +0000

Thank you for those plugins…

I found you on Google’s search result :d