Yes, you should cloak your affiliate links!
Affiliate links are completely obvious. For example, here is my affiliate link for StudioPress:
https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=346200&u=84626&m=28169&urllink=&afftrack=
When I cloak that link on this site, it ends up looking like:
https://rosalindgardner.com/blog/studiopress
Both links go to the same URL and both will generate an affiliate commission when a sale is made, but the latter link is SO much better in many ways – 10 ways to be precise. Here are the reasons you too should cloak your affiliate links.
- To prevent your affiliate ID from showing in the link. Many Internet users won’t trust you once they discover that you are an affiliate marketer through seeing an obvious affiliate link in their browser’s status bar, despite your brilliantly-written, informative and useful product reviews. You lose credibility with them simply because you are writing reviews for profit.
- To prevent affiliate ID stripping / commission by-passing. Rather than risk having you earn a commission by buying a product through your affiliate link; some folks will copy your affiliate link, strip out the affiliate ID and then buy the product you recommended. As products don’t cost more when purchased through an affiliate link, there is no good reason for this behavior — other than the fact that they are not nice people.
- To prevent affiliate link swapping. Some affiliate marketers can be nasty too. A nasty affiliate will strip your ID and replace it with their own affiliate ID. This scenario seems to be more common when promoting Clickbank products, where affiliates (most often) don’t require an individual vendor’s approval to promote their products. Therefore, anyone with a Clickbank affiliate account can swap out your affiliate ID with their ID and then use their affiliate link to buy the product. You lose your 50 – 70% commission and the thieving affiliate saves that much on their purchase. These affiliates obviously know nothing about karma, or Clickbank’s policies.
- To avoid search ranking penalties. One way Google ranks sites is on the basis of popularity, i.e. how many sites link to that particular site. Google does not, however, consider affiliate links a good measure of popularity, as those links point to sites for the purpose of making money. Google, therefore, wants all affiliate links to be coded with the rel=nofollow attribute, which is a direct pain in the butt if you must code each link manually.
- To hide your affiliate links from social media sites. If you post affiliate links on Facebook or Twitter, your post either won’t get seen in the news feed (Facebook), or worse, you might get your account suspended (Twitter). Under Abuse and Spam in the Twitter Rules you will find the following statement – “If you post misleading links (e.g. affiliate links, links to malware/clickjacking pages, etc.).” I wouldn’t trust the nice folks at Twitter enough to ascertain whether an affiliate link is truly misleading before they terminate your account, so best to avoid that problem before it begins.
- To improve your search engine rankings. Cloaked affiliate links that point back to your own domain from social media sites, forums and other blogs might help improve your search engine rankings with Google.
- To thwart ad blockers. If a visitor uses a browser extension such as AdBlock Plus, they will not see the banners on your site that are coded with straight affiliate links. That in itself is a great reason to download banners and host them on your own site.
- To make affiliate link management easier. Product links expire and affiliate programs close from time to time, requiring that you change or remove those affiliate links. I’ve discussed StudioPress so often on this blog that I can only imagine how frustrating it would be to find and change all those links… IF I didn’t use a cloaking script.
- To improve link tracking. Many affiliate link cloaking options (listed below) offer click and conversion tracking, a/b split testing, external pixel tracking and ad tracking reports.
- Increase conversions and revenue. Last but certainly not least, when you avoid all of the bad possibilities listed above, you’re bound to make more money from your affiliate endeavors. J
How to Cloak Affiliate Links
I’ll begin this section with a warning – do NOT use bit.ly, tinyurl, Goo.gl or other link shorteners to cloak your affiliate links. First of all, Bit.ly links aren’t private, meaning anyone can check to see how well your money links are performing. Secondly, they often won’t show up on social media feeds (or they stop working entirely), so there’s no point in wasting your time with them.
There are a number of different affiliate link cloaking options available; including self-hosted scripts and plugins for WordPress. I don’t list online cloaking services, because I believe you should have complete control over your affiliate links and you can never tell when an online service might go out of business.
On most of my sites, I use a php redirection script to cloak my affiliate links. I also use Pretty Link PRO on my personal blog.
Although there are dozens of options available, I've listed only 4 here. These are the most popular link cloakers used by professional affiliates. Check out the list below to see which solution suits you best.
Affiliate Link Cloakers
- Pretty Link Pro
Shorten links using your own domain name. Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, o/s and host. You can also track clicks from emails. The professional version is a significant upgrade to Pretty Link Lite that adds many tools and redirection types that will allow you to create pretty links automatically, cloak links, auto-tweet links, replace keywords though-out your blog and much more. - ThirstyAffiliates
Thirsty Affiliates (free version) lets you administer your affiliate links, assists you with inserting them into your posts, pages and comments and gives you a central location in WordPress to manage all of your affiliate links. They offer a number of add-ons for click tracing, geolocation, importing affiliate links from Amazon and more. - Easy Redirect Script
Create redirect URLs using your own website domain. One standout feature is the Stealth Page, which forces the redirect URL to display in the browser’s address bar. The program comes complete with stats tracking, SEO options, categories & descriptions, along with tool tips and excellent documentation.
I hope this list of reasons to cloak your affiliate links has convinced you that doing so is absolutely necessary if you want to avoid commission theft and make more money.
Did you find this post informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question or suggestion, please post it below!
Cheers,
Thanks a lot for the information Rosalind!
So far I’ve been using Scarlett App cloaker and has been working great for me but I will try the Pretty Link Pro to see if its better 🙂
You’re most welcome, Victor. 🙂
I noticed that you mentioned that “cloaking” is available in Pretty Links Pro.
I am using the free version.
Is getting the pretty link: “https://mywebsite.com/go/whereIamsendingyou” “cloaked?”
Or is “cloaked” referring to something else?
Hi Jon,
Yes, the example you gave is a cloaked link. The nice thing about professional (paid) cloaking plugins is that they offer so much more, i.e. tracking, organizing, etc.
Cheers,
Ros
Thanks Rosalind!
And thanks for adding the option to subscribe to comments.
And… Thanks for taking the time to let me know by email that you responded. 🙂
I was pretty sure that was what you meant by a cloaked link.
I am currently using the free version of Pretty Links which also has the cloaking option.
I was just looking at their website and it does look like the pro versions have good features.
Blessings!
You’re most welcome, Jon! My pleasure.
Hi Rosalind!
I’ve been searching for a while now to find a quality post about tracking and cloaking links – as I myself also didn’t feel quite happy with the ones you highly recommend not to use. Hadn’t thought it would be so hard to find a well written one.
So thanks a lot for sharing your experience and advice.
But still – I’ve got some questions on my mind. So if you could help me out…(guess you can 😉 )
First, do you personally know the “Easy Affiliate Links” WP plugin, too?
Just wonder if it’s possible to not only cloak but also track all of my links (website / blog, outgoing emails, social media) with this plugin.
Second, “Easy Redirect Script” seems quite interesting to me. What’s it all about with the stealth feature you mentioned?
My base line these days is: free of charge, cloaking and link tracking.
Will appriciate your profound advice (and surely refer to this article on my blog the next week).
Gruß,
Veit
Hi Rosalind. Very well written post about cloaking links.
I’ve had pretty link pro for almost a month now and I still haven’t used even 10% of its full potential, cloaking links is one of them. I didn’t understand it and didn’t know what they’re good for until I bumped into this post. Thank you.
I started a guitar blog (you can click on my name to visit it) in which I do promote some products/services through affiliate marketing, of which I learned from wealthy affiliate. Even though my content is very, very good and I touch on each point the best I could, I’m still struggling for google ranking to start seeing some consistent revenue, otherwise I just get lucky once in a while through a random sale.
Many tell me that my blog is fine, I just have to give it more time (been up for 6-7 months only), and I bought pretty link pro, SEO pro plugin, Divi theme wishing to improve my ranking, it got improved but marginally only, nothing worth mentioning.
Anyways, thanks for the info.
Thank you so much. That’s cloaking very clever. Now I can run ads with an unlimited budget, avoid death from facebook
These plugins are really compulsory for all who are doing affiliate marketing. It decreases the 100 characters affiliate link in few characters. I heard about these plugins a few months ago, now, I came to know a lot about these plugins. If in future, I chose doing Affiliate Marketing, I’ll be surely using these.
Hi Rosalind
For the past years, I have been following your post and receiving your updated emails.
It is greatly amazing !!!
What worried me is the affiliate code to post on all the social media.
After using cloaking affiliate links for my affiliate code. Do you think that I still could use Facebook or Twitter to promote the products at all these social media, and whether they would terminate my account?
Kindly advise. Thank you so much, Rosalind.
With Gratitude
Hillevi
Hi Hillevi,
It is best not to link directly to the merchant site with affiliate links. Link back to a landing page on your own blog.
I hope that helps.
Cheers,
Ros
Oops… looks like I found my answer!
Good to hear, Kiki! 🙂
If bit.ly isn’t a good option to use for cloaking (on an HTML site), would you recommend using the google url shortener instead?
Hi Rosalind,
Great article and very good advise.
Guess Pretty Links are only for WordPress. Are you aware of any link cloakers for websites?
Thx,
Kenneth
Hi Kenneth,
I’m not aware of link cloakers for HTML websites… I haven’t worked with HTML sites in over a decade. Sorry.
Cheers,
Ros
Hi Rosalind,
Thank you for sending me your list of affiliate cloaking links. This info is very much appreciated!
My pleasure, Mary Ann. Happy to know it’s appreciated. 🙂
Hi Ros,
Is it possible to cloak affiliate links for banner ads or just text links?
Cheers,
Kathryn
Hi Kathryn,
You can cloak affiliate links for banner ads provided you save the banner and upload it to your site / blog.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Ros
Ros,
According to my BitDefender security, this article contains links that contain malware. You should know better then to put your users at risk.
Nico,
I DO know better and would never put my readers (I don’t refer to them as ‘users’) at risk.
According to my Trend Micro Maximum Security, your Bit Defender security is full of kaka.
Ros
Hi Rosalind,
Thank you so much for the suggestions and advice on cloaking links. I’ve known for a while not to use bit.ly but just wasn’t sure what to use. I am probably one of the ones losing out on some commissions. I will be trying out your suggested ones to see which works for me.
Thanks again for your great advice, always.
You’re welcome, as always, Monna. 🙂
Hi Rosalind,
Awesome blog post and thank you
I used many times the bit.ly and after reading your post … no more!
I am also grateful to Lynn Terry (clicknewz.com) for introducing you in her post
If not I will never have known you and many other post by you.
Thank you once again and definitely going follow your advice.
Thanks, James!!
Rosalind,
Thank you for reminding me about cloaking links. I had started using Elf Links, and then life got a little crazy – so I forgot about it! What do you think about Elf Links by Kindsvater?
Hi Viviane,
You’re welcome.
I’m not familiar with Elf Links. I took a quick check and it looks good, but I’d have to do more research to understand the implications of the links not showing at all.
Cheers,
Ros
Thanks Rosalind for the wonderful list of cloaking affiliate links. I once used bit.ly but NO more since reading this article. I’ve gotta get to work!
Hi Sonia,
Thanks for sharing. Happy to know I could help. 🙂
Cheers,
Ros