Link Cloaking?

[Thoth]

Hello again,

I know i have been posting a lot, but i am getting informative feedback that is helping me. Hope this is ok. Anyway, I have found out that your affiliate url can be hijacked and commissions can be stolen. Is the true?
Will a link cloaker stop this? If so, can you get one for free, where? Is a link cloaker neccessary?

Thanks
-adam

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Adam,

Don't worry about asking questions, we're here to help.

One thing to keep in mind is that for the most part you can only POTENTIALLY have your commission stolen by another affiliate IF the MERCHANT allows parasites or adware affiliates in their program. Many merchants, including 5 Star programs, pro-actively screen against that type of thing and some affiliate networks like ShareResults and Shareasale don't allow them in either.

Most of the stealing happens due to download applications the consumer has installed on their computer and they all work differently. Some are designed to pop on the merchant site no matter where the visitor comes from, so in those cases I'm not sure cloaking would help.

But there are some other reasons for cloaking or using a re-direct which is what most affiliates do.
Here's a thread with more info. How to hide your affiliate links

[Thoth]

Thanks Linda
You're great!

[ali82]

Hey, Thoth! I use cloaking, it is free and you can make money off it too.

[Arun Lakhera]

Affiliate url hijacking has become a common problem. There are many ways of saving your commission from theft. You can use software; make html files or php files, hire url services for solving your problem. I would like to use software to solve this problem. It is much easier than making html or php files. It saves precious time.

[Joseph Ratliff]

I use Affiliate Cloaker Pro with good results.

Cloak away, especially for longer links with a whole bunch of symbols and stuff in them.

[Oregon Coast Guy]

There's a few very good pieces of software out there to cloak links. I personally use covertLinks and really like it a lot.

Regards,

Tony