How to hide your affiliate links

[its_me_shaners]

In many of the forums I visit I come across the perennial question:
How do I hide my affiliate links, or what can i do about hop link theft?
So I went about the search and heres what I found that may solve those problems for you.

METHOD ONE: By creating redirecting pages:
1. Open your note pad or html editor.
2. Copy and paste this code in your note pad and save as '.html' file with a catchy name.
<*HTML><*HEAD><*TITLE>Redirecting to youraffiliatesite.com...<*/TITLE> <*meta http-*****="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.youraffiliate link here"> <*/HEAD> <*BODY> <*P>You will be redirected to youraffiliatesite.com.<*/P> <*/BODY> <*/HTML>
TIP: Second line of this code ("refresh" metatag) should be in SINGLE line. Take out all * characters from the html code.
3. Upload this file to your server. Send this URL in your emails or keep on your website.
4. When your subscriber or visitor clicks on the link they will be redirected to your affiliate page.
METHOD TWO: A cool Html Trick that works on your webpages:
Usually you will keep your links in this format-
<*A href="http://www.youraffiliatelink">clickhere
In this way when you keep your cursor over the link, you can see your long affiliate link.
Instead of above code, you can keep this code-
<*A href="http://www.youraffiliate link" onMouseOver= "window.status='your text here!'; return true" onMouseOut= "window.status=''; return true"*>Click here<*/a><*BR><*BR>
(Take out all * characters from html code)
Whole of the above line should be in SINGLE line. When you keep cursor on the link, you can see the text that you put in the status bar.

METHOD THREE: Producing Frame pages:
Actually your visitor sees a link like - http://www.yoursite.com/product/index.html.
But when he clicks on the link he will be taken to a page where top frame showing links to your site and lower frame showing your affiliate product page.
<*html> <*head><*title>your title<*/title><*/head> <*frameset rows="20%,*" border=0> <*frame name="top" src="http://www.yoursite.com/yourlinks.htm" marginwidth="10" marginheight="10" scrolling="Auto" frameborder="no" noresize> <*frame name="bottom" src="http://www.affiliatesite.com/youraffid?12345" marginwidth="10" marginheight="10" scrolling="Auto" frameborder="no" noresize> <*noframes> <*body> <*p>This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them.<*/p> <*/body> <*/noframes> <*/frameset> <*/html>
You can also use cgi scripts to make this happen - http://www.webmasters-central.com/Se...d_Redirection/
Basically these scripts retain a link for your site but your visitor goes to your affiliate site. He can come back to your site anytime by clicking on the links in the top frame.
___________
feel free to use or publish this article in full or in part But do inlcude a link back to me. http://affiliatesforyou.blogspot.com
___________

[Linda Buquet]

Shaners,

Thanks SO much for that. I get asked that all the time so now I can just send people to this post!

WORDS OF WARNING and this is why I hesitate giving affiliate link cloaking advice.

1) Most SE don't like re-directs so careful how you do them

2) Some types of re-directs and cloaking can break the link so it doesn not track

3) Some merchant prohibit framing and/or full page re-directs

So ALWAYS check the merchant TOS and also TEST YOUR LINKS to be sure they track.

[its_me_shaners]

NO worries Linda just trying to be as helpful as I can be

[Nguyen]

Those are great tips. However, it may become time-consuming or a problem of managing when you start promoting a lot of links.

Here's a free software that will do that for you:
http://affilorama.net/specials/poweraffiliatekit.html

There's also a brand new tool that does that and more. In fact, nothing comes even close to this. It gives you the ability to manage all your affiliate links, track their click-throughs, rotate the destination URLs, etc.

It's worth taking a look.

http://www.GoTryThis.com

[Nguyen]

By the way, you can also...

1. Use a service like www.tinyurl.com
2. Register a domain and forward it

[Clickbank Hotshot]

here is the method i use for one-off affiliate links. create a little php file, say innocuous.php, which looks something like the following :

PHP Code:

<?php

    $redirect_url = 'http://some/url/with/an/affiliate/id/';

    header( "Location: {$redirect_url}" );
?>

then just direct people to innocuous.php and they will end up on the appropriate sales page. this is a lot easier than writing HTML files, i think.

of course, the file has to go into a directory that can handle PHP scripts, but most document roots handle PHP without any problem.

[StephenR]

Good stuff. I use to mess with .htaccess and meta refreshes. I kinda like this method. I'll probably be giving your review scipt a whirl too for semreviews.com, a search engine marketing review site.

[KPR]

Exellent tips here thanks.

I was using a cloaking script before but was told SE didnt like it.

[Clickbank Hotshot]

hi KPR. i don't think SEs like any URL that involves some sort of redirection, including the one i suggested. but they still do index the pages and assign PR weights--just not to final page they end up on (in this case, say, innocuous.php could get a PR value of 2 because of all the content on http://some/url/with/an/affiliate/id/, but that URL itself would not get any PR weighting due to innocuous.php). well, that's my understanding of it, though i'm no SEO authority. either way, when dealing with affiliate id hiding, SEO concerns are usually not high on the priority list for the affiliate.

Stephen, if you try out Red Queen, don't hesitate to query me about the program. i used to spend my time solely coding for that application. then one day i decided i needed a decent demonstration of the thing in action and started looking around for a way to use it. it didn't take long for me to realize that it had a place in affiliate marketing, so that's the road i'm heading down now. early days for me in that area, though. but it looks promising.

[mickcharm]

Hi, tried this link cloaking in frontpage just to test but when I right clicked the mouse "Click Here" (in preview page) you could still see my affiliate ID. How can I modify this to put a link in an article or on a forum page as this is a link for a webpage.
<*A href="http://www.youraffiliate link" onMouseOver= "window.status='your text here!'; return true" onMouseOut= "window.status=''; return true"*>Click here<*/a><*BR><*BR>
(Take out all * characters from html code)

Cheers
Michael