Comment on Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial by SEO Dave.

Link Cloaking PHP Script I think you’ve misunderstood the Stallion link cloaking feature which is turned on under “SEO Advanced Options” : “Cloak Affiliate Links ON”.

If you have a WordPress site which links to affiliate products you don’t really want to waste valuable link benefit linking to places like Amazon. When you add a link to an Amazon affiliate product for example you can use the Stallion link cloaking technique.

So no you wouldn’t change all links to use the Stallion link cloaking code, only links to affiliate sites or links you want Google not to consider a link like links added by your commenters to comments (do you want Google to count links you haven’t vetted added by commenters?). there’s some options under the “Cloak Links” settings on the “SEO Advanced Options” page.

If you have sites promoting affiliate products it can be automated if all the links use the same format, though based on your questions it’s going to beyond your level of understanding since it requires some SQL search and replaces that are easy to get wrong. That being said if all your affiliate links are currently nofollow (include the rel=”nofollow” tag, which tends to be the case) Stallion will automatically cloak them (cloaks all nofollow links when “Cloak Affiliate Links ON” is ticked).

Another use might be if you are giving a service a bad review, you want to link to the service so your visitors can go see how bad it is, but you don’t want to give Google an indication you think the site is valuable **

** Google uses backlinks as a vote for a webpage, when you link to a website you are saying to Google this is a good website and should be ranked higher even when you are giving the site a bad review. A link from a bad review gives the site linked to a boost in Google!!!

The Massive Passive Profits Plugin (autoblog plugin) is pretty much dead, so I wouldn’t use it (still have customers who use it, so I support it via Stallion Responsive).

WP Robot is a very good autoblog plugin (best there is), it can automatically add content including affiliate content from places like Amazon to a WordPress blog and I’ve added features to Stallion Responsive to support WP Robot users (a LOT of autobloggers use Stallion).

See my WP Robot Review (I have Stallion cloaked links on that review page), do NOT install WPRobot on an important domain, always assume Google will penalize any domain you are using an autoblog plugin on long term. If you use WPRobot to autoblog it’s a case of using throw away domains, you expect to get them banned long term and when they are you throw them away and move on (build more autoblogs).

It’s really easy to create autoblogs, not so easy to generate a lot of traffic to them since Google hates them. I don’t like the throwaway domain concept so only use autoblogs for testing, see if I can find ways around Google downgrading them (it’s an SEO challenge) rather than to make money from them per se. I make money from autoblogs, but don’t care about the money, it’s the challenge and so far Google is winning tends to find 90% of autoblogs within a few years.

As a new Stallion Responsive user after you get past the basic SEO options I recommend concentrating on the keyphrases added by editing your current and new posts. The Stallion keyphrases (All In One SEO Title and Keyphrase 1 to Keyphrase 4) are extremely important, used by multiple SEO features. With over 100 posts you have a lot of work to add the keyphrases, use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner for performing keyword research to determine what keyphrases to use to gain maximum traffic for each post (it’s a lot of work).

The link cloaking post for example has these keyphrases:

WordPress Title: WordPress Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial
All In One SEO Title: Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial
Keyphrase 1: Cloak Affiliate Links
Keyphrase 2: WordPress Cloak Affiliate Links
Keyphrase 3: WordPress Cloak Links
Keyphrase 4: Cloak Links Tutorial

I have the number 1 Google spot for several of them. I wouldn’t have the variety of SERPs without the supporting keyphrases, they are really important to my SEO strategy. This site has over 200 posts, took months to add the keyphrases to older articles.

David