On April 27th, Clickbank announced that their new HopLink Shield links were fully operational.
HopLink Shield is a free tool on the Clickbank website that encrypts the affiliate and vendor nicknames in HopLinks. It is supposed to add another layer of privacy / anonymity to help keep affiliates promotional efforts and techniques hidden.
It doesn't quite work that way, however.
As shown in the sceenshot below, to encode your HopLinks your hoplinks, you enter your affiliate nickname and the vendor nickname below then hit the “Encode” button (or you can get the same type of links encoded directly through the Clickbank Marketplace without going to the Encoder).
You then end up with a hoplink that looks like this:
http://e3f88il-ze5dou56-ib8trcsef.hop.clickbank.net/
Now, if you go to https://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_encoding.htm you'll see the “Decoder” on the right side of the page, so the new links don't exactly hide anything.
So, don't give up on your redirects just yet.