7 Ways to Hide Affiliate Links

 I was able to uncover seven distinct strategies for hiding affiliate links after doing a comprehensive investigation. Link cloaking, also known as link masking, is the practise of masking one's affiliate link with another link that doesn't resemble an affiliate link.

The most recent versions of the two popular browsers, Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 5, were used to evaluate each link cloaking technique. The hidden is url shortener safe might be seen in the status bar of the calling website using any mechanism. However, five of the tested approaches gave the game away by putting the bare affiliate link in the URL bar of the target page.

Obviously, this makes it possible for dishonest individuals to stop there and alter your affiliate information to their own, thereby stealing your commission.

This article does not discuss how each of these approaches functions. I should point out that all but three of the solutions demand for you to generate a new file called "myfile.htm" that you can use as a link to refer visitors to instead of the affiliate site.

3. PHP redirect; 1. Meta refresh; and 2. Javascript redirect.

These three link-cloaking techniques each need a different cloaking file and are rather simple to utilise. However, at the end, they all display your affiliate link.

4. Redirects in.htaccess. The easiest approach is this one. All you have to do is add one line of code to your.htaccess file, which is already there. Yet again, your affiliate link appears later.

Iframe or Frame 5. This is maybe the worst strategy ever created. It's not really a different approach. One of the aforementioned redirection is enclosed Top 10 link shortener  in a frame or an iframe. The fact that the affiliate webpage is really on your own website means that your affiliate link is never seen, which was a significant benefit when this strategy was initially developed.

I still see other websites promoting this strategy, despite the fact that they are obviously unaware of the fact that employing a frame would result in you losing the majority of your affiliate revenue. The explanation is that your user's computer is rejecting the cookie that your affiliate site sets since only "third-party cookies" may be placed from within a frame, and most users have these turned off by default.

6. URL truncators. There are two compelling arguments against using this cloaking technique.

All of the link-shortening websites I looked into, including TinyURL and Bit.ly, provide you a very short link without requiring you to have a'myfile.htm' cloaking file on your PC. In fact, these links will function in emails and on social bookmarking websites even if you don't have a computer.

They are so unattractive, though, that some how can you shorten a youtube link individuals will avoid using them when they see the URL in their task bar, fearing that they are being directed to a website that may infect them with malware.

If that's not enough of a reason to avoid URL shorteners, consider the fact that spammers have misused them so badly that, on Bit.ly, for instance, visiting one of their links will send you to a "Warning" page that instructs you to use the original affiliate link in its place.

Base64 coding is 7. Fortunately, there is a technique for hiding affiliate links that has none of the drawbacks listed above. The user may be sent to any page on the affiliate website, and it sets your affiliate cookie before doing so, which is a fantastic feature. Visit one of my websites listed below for additional details on this amazing free link cloaker.

More details on why you should cloak your Does YouTube allow URL shortener? links and how each of the aforementioned techniques operate may be found on the author's two websites. Please check out his two websites' pages on link cloaking: For Your Website: Scripts