Cloak Affiliate Links Guide

Comment on Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial by SEO Dave.

I can confirm the Stallion cloaked links are setup correctly. They are meant to look and act like normal text links until you view source.

The way to check is to view source, I tend to use Firefox for browsing and found an interesting anomaly when viewing source the ‘quick’ way.

The quick way is selecting the text/link etc… you want to view source followed by right-click and “View Selection Source” which pops up a window with just the content you want to check.

With the link cloaking script which uses javascript which is apparently not loaded correctly on the “View Selection Source” pop up you get a messed up text link/cloaked link: I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what I’d done wrong code wise when I added cloaking to Stallion when the code was spot on :-)

So to view source use the not so quick way, don’t select anything on the page and right-click followed by “View Page Source” which pops up the entire pages code (and loads te javascript correctly).

You can achieve similar in IE and Chrome etc…

If you see the code like

<span class="affst" title="testing" id="UNIQUECODE1">Anchor Text of Link</span>

and in the browser with javascript turned on you see a normal text link it worked.

Also clicking the link will open the link in a new window.

Since the javascript code is loaded at the bottom of the page code wise there can also be short delay before the text of the cloaked links is converted into a text link on the fly by the javascript.

I see you are using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin with some damaging SEO settings, your category links are nofollow. Nofollow deletes link benefit, if you plan to use a WordPress SEO plugin don’t use the nofollow or noindex settings. Also the Yoast plugin if the canonical URL feature is used breaks the Stallion SEO Super Comments pages, it adds a canonical URL back to the original post the comment is from which means Google doesn’t index the SEO Super Comments post! This will be true for any plugin that disables the WordPress canonical URLs and adds their own.

In Stallion 6.3 (next update, working on it now) I’ve added the All In One SEO Pack Plugin code directly into Stallion with major improvements, it takes Stallion SEO to another level. Since it uses the All In One SEO Pack Plugin code, Stallion will use that plugins settings related to titles etc… for specific posts. Not looked into this yet, but as I understand it there’s plugins for moving data from various WordPress SEO plugins (like Yoast WordPress SEO) and other themes into All In One SEO so they should work for Stallion’s All In One SEO basic settings.

I’ve stopped adding new features to Stallion 6.3 and working on debugging the new and some old code, so the update should be live soon.

David