What is link cloaking and why is it important?

srikanta30 Level 1

March 31, 2017, 3:15 am

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“Link cloaking” is a term that you might not have heard of if you are a newbie in affiliate marketing. It is a very important task for all the affiliate marketers especially to protect your hard earned money.Imagine you make a review site or an affiliate site in which you have spent a lot of money to look good. You have put your affiliate link for people to click and buy the product so that you make a commission. But wait! What if some hacker or any other harmful person comes and changes your affiliate link with theirs?All your hard work, time and most importantly money are wasted because you will not be able to make any money with it and someone else will enjoy the benefits of your hard work.Don’t be afraid because that happens very rarely, but it can happen to you. So, what can you do to protect yourself from it?You hide your affiliate link (not from the traffic). This is what we call “link cloaking”.This simply means you change the way it looks so that someone cannot recognize that it is an affiliate link.This will also help you to increase your conversions.Let’s take an example-Suppose you find the link below on a website or someone emailed this link to you-Hop.clickbank.com=?userejjd3463486rhjfhnsdjfnsfhsgfsgfhsdfhfThen you are less likely to click on this link. Simply because it looks spammy and ugly. And they will think this is a virus or something like that. But if your link was like this-www.earnmoney.com/how-to-earn-money-fastThen you are more likely to click on the link. Because it looks much more appealing and trustworthy than the previous link.So, these are the two basic purpose of cloaking your affiliate link-1) To hide it from the hackers2) To increase your conversionsNow, you have learned what is “link cloaking”. But the next question which will come to your mind is that how can you do it?If you use Wordpress then it is really a very simple thing to do.Just login to your Wordpress admin page. Then click on settings and go to “permalinks”. There you can easily choose what link structure you want to use. I highly recommend using the “Post name” structure because it looks really good and good for SEO as well.If you use FTP client like Filezilla then simply make a text document and rename it to robot.txtThen simply put the code-<?phpHeader(‘Location: your link’);?>You have to put your link in the “your link” area. Then simply change the file extension from .txt to .php then put in in a folder and name it whatever you can and then upload it to your server using your FTP client. Suppose you name it “money” and your domain name is makemoney.com. Then this link will take you to the target URL- makemoney.com/money/robot.php So, this is what link cloaking is all about. Hope this article has helped you.

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Are some link cloak plugins...
People say by link cloaking, your affiliate commission will reduce, so better find it out before link cloak.....

10 years ago