Link Cloaking and Testing - first posting

[garya]

Hi marketers

i have two questions , one is how do you protect your affiliate links from
hi jackers[hackers] ?
and my second question is how can you verify that my affiliate link is alive
my meaning is that would i be getting credit for each sale and how do you
verify ??
thank you
garya

{{Title edited by Admin to be more decriptive}}

[Linda Buquet]

Hi garya,

Welcome to 5 Star and thanks for starting off with some great questions.

As far as cloaking goes, there are pros and cons. With any cloaking you try, be sure to test your links to be sure they still track and don't get broken or lose cookies based on the cloaking script.

I get this funny feeling you are talking about Clickbank - but maybe not. Lots of CB links get hijacked just because it's so easy to chop off the affiliate part of your link. Also with CJ their tracking SUCKS so you can't even test links to see if they track because there is no click tracking.

With MOST affiliate programs you can test links by clicking right after you join - before anyone else sees the link. Then go to the tracking stats to see if a click registered. NOTE: If you click 5 times in a row some tracking software will filter and only show one click from a unique visitor in a certain time-frame.
So don't think if you click 5 and it only show 1 the link didn't track.


Here's info about a cool program that will cloak AND help you organize your links. http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliat...izer-cloaking/

Here are some articles about how to hide links using htaccess which is one of the most common ways to do it. http://www.google.com/search?num=20&...ss&btnG=Search

Hope this helps and hope you jump into some more discussions.

[garya]

Hi Linda
thank you for the great information , trying to get all this affilate
information in my head is really confusing at times. look forward to
more articles on this forum.
thank you
garya