Comment on Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial by SEO Dave.
Depends what level of URL cloaking you are after?
If it’s basic 301 redirect type cloaking where you put a link to something like
yoursite.com/awesomestuff
and it goes to
affiliatesite.com/mytrackingid.php (like a Clickbank link for example).
You can easily achieve this for free.
There are free WordPress plugins that do link cloaking though I’ve never used them as use a PHP script I found years ago. Spits out 301 redirected URLs
That goes to the MPP plugin sales page (affiliate link). The domain above is another one of my domains that I use for most of my single tracking affiliate links (Clickbank for example), easy to update/change them then.
The PHP script is called PHP Click counter and is free looks like there’s a new version (I’m using 1.1).
I also use some advanced javascript with these links to hide them from search engines. In Stallion 6 this advanced javascript is installed with the theme and works along side the Massive Passive Profits Autoblog Plugin to hide the affiliate and other links from articles posted by the plugin.
See Massive Passive Profits Plugin Stallion Theme SEO for more details. It’s all automated, click a few tick boxes and it works with the autoblog plugin.
The javascript installed with Stallion 6 is ready to work with PHP cloaking scripts like the Click counter script I’m using. You edit one js file (basically a text file) and paste the format of the cloaked links in once and it works.
After I release Stallion 6 plan to make a tutorial on how to use it for other affiliate links (it’s easy when you know how). I’m using it on plenty of affiliate sites, means links are cloaked and more importantly they waste no link benefit to affiliates.
For example I use Shareasale datafeed on around a dozen test sites and used a customised import script that imports the datafeeds to WordPress and adds the affiliate links in the right format so they are both cloaked (I use another PHP technique for the cloaking gives URLs like example.com/buynow.php?id=1234) and are hidden with the advanced javascript (all automated after setting up the format).
Will be real easy for you to get working when I release Stallion 6 (end of the month I hope).
David
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