This post was written by Everett Sizemore, a Guest Blogger from the First Page Fitness Marketing Group.
There are a number of reasons why you don’t want your affiliate tracking link to be available for all to see. Below are a few of those reasons, followed by links to a few resources to help you get started with affiliate redirects, ad-tracking or jump scripts.
Hiding Affiliate Links from Spiders
Anyone who has been around the affiliate marketing industry for awhile knows how frustrating it can be to have Google see your beautiful place on the web as an affiliate site. But for those who haven’t heard the term before, it basically means you lack content, don’t link out to enough non-affiliate sites, and link out to too many affiliate sites.
There are a number of ways you can avoid this, and making it look like affiliate links are just links to other pages in your site is one of them.
Hiding Affiliate Links from Visitors
This may seem like an underhanded tactic, but really it is just smart marketing. When someone using IE hovers over a link you don’t want them to see a load of gobbledy-gook. You want them to see a nice, clean URL. It just seems more trustworthy and user-friendly. Besides, just because you are monetizing your website doesn’t mean you have to advertise that you advertise.
Hiding Affiliate Links from Parasites
An affiliate parasite writes over the cookies set on your website with their own cookies to steal your commissions. This can be accomplished in many different ways, but perhaps the two most common are Adware pop ups, and shady toolbars. If you want more information about who’s being naughty and who’s being nice, check out Ben Edelmans blog: https://www.benedelman.org/ .
I know of a few very popular toolbars out there that have been shown to do utilize this DIRTY tactic, but I do not ‘Care 2’ mention them because that’s not my job, it’s Bens. 😉 . Hiding your affiliate links won’t necessarily fix this problem (avoiding affiliate programs that aren’t clean will) but it certainly helps.
What Does a Hidden Affiliate Link Look Like?
You can hide affiliate links in many different ways, from ad servers and redirect pages, to simple jump-scripts. If you look at one of the review pages on Compare The Brands (example here: https://www.comparethebrands.com/compare/63) you will see that all of the affiliate links, such as “Get cheaper prices here” are hidden behind a folder called /outlink/ on the Compare The Brands domain. But if you click on the link it actually takes you to the merchants website with an entirely different URL. There is nothing wrong with this, and the site above is probably just protecting itself from parasites and ensuring that they have data about what users click on.
Why Do Directories and Lead Generation Sites Hide Links?
In part, these sites send outbound links through a redirect because they don’t want to pass on page rank / link popularity to the other site. But most of the time it is just a way to track clicks for accounting and analytics purposes.
How Do You Hide Affiliate Links?
While I am not going to give you step-by-step instructions here and now without knowing what kind of server you use, whether you have a database, etcetera, I have put together a few resources to help get you started:
How to Cloak Affiliate Links With Click Tracking
Wikipedia on Ad Tracking
How to Create an Affiliate Jump Script
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
I own a 4 letter domain and just do redirects from it for my affiliate links. So far so good.
BeachBum
Comparethebrands.com is using what looks like .htaccess redirects. I have few webhosts that do not allow me to touch .htacess so php redirect works great.
Great tips on how to conceal one’s affiliate links.
If anyone is having trouble cloaking or redirecting their affiliate links, Donna of SEO Scoop has worked with a friend to create a really cool tool that anyone can use. It is as easy as this gets. Check it out by visiting her site, linked to in the trackback comment above: “New Tool to Hide Stuff…”.
And thanks to Todd for letting me post this article last year. Hey Todd when are we going to hang out at a conference? I’m coming to your neck of the woods for SMX Advanced this year.
Everett…I’ll be at SMX Advanced and will be looking for you there:.)