Cloaking and redirects

In the SEO realm, it is well known that Google does not like affiliate links. To encumber the whole blog with banners, Adsense ads and other adverts is not a good move if you want to be on good terms with the search engine we all love to hate.  Google dominates, and if you are in Google’s bad book your whole future as an internet marketer is wavering on the edge of a cliff. If you do not make radical changes on your blog / website and focus more on quality content, you risk losing your future income.
Once you’ve been punished for keyword spamming, link spamming or affiliate-link spamming it may take a while before your site’s reputation is recovered. Better avoid that punishment from the start, right?

As a blogger, you don’t need to worry about this as much as if you have a regular web site. Your position in the blog charts will not change regardless of what Google thinks. However you lose the organic traffic from search engines and it can sometimes be quite a lot of traffic involved.
How unlikely it may seem for us bloggers people are, first and foremost, searching for information in the usual way; via search engines. This is easy to forget sometimes.

There, thats was problem number 1; Google’s reluctance to affiliate links.
Problem number 2 is the visitors who do not think you should earn commission from your links and they remove tracker code from the URLs. On top of it all, there are hackers who like to hijack your affiliate links and steal commission from you.
It’s a cruel world we live in. ;-)

Sure, but then we can just use cloak links, right?  Cloaking means hiding affiliate links using other links. In other words, you get another link pointing to the correct link.

There is only one small catch … Google does not like cloak links, either.

Plague or cholera? Or maybe a little of each? Sometimes you only get bad options and have to make the best out of the situation. My suggestion is not to exaggerate in any direction. Use a little of both and stay alert.

Here are some simple ways to cloak and redirect links:

HTML, PHP and Java – redirecs

One way is to make a so-called HTML redirect. You simply create a page on your own domain, and that page will redirect the traffic on to the sales page.

<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.link.com”>

Simply replace www.link.com with your affiliate link.

The problem is that the code for redirects to be added inside <head> and </ head> tags, which complicates things when you have a blog.

Instead, you can use a simple javascript:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://www.link.com”
//–></script>

This redirect show no trace on the page, but is making it difficult to keep statistics. The same applies for redirection with PHP. The code looks like this:

<?php
header(“Location: http://www.link.com”);
?>

You can also use redirect with htaccess, but that topic is a bit over the top. However, I will raise the subject at a later date.

 Cloaking services

I do not recommend online cloaking services because many of them are just trying to take advantage of all the free traffic they get and there are also scam sites that replace your links with their own. It may take a while before you even realize it and who knows how much money you’ve lost then?
  As if that wasn’t enough, Google will immediately find your cloak links and start frowning.

If you still want to use a cloaking service you can visit TinyURL. From what I know they do not hijack affiliate links, but it has happened that they delete links so they no longer work.
I strongly recommend that you use the tag rel = “nofollow” on your cloak links, so the search engine crawlers don’t start sniffing about. This also applies on your redirect pages.