Do you mask your affiliate links from places like cj/azoogle? I ask because some people seem to think that it increases conversion if they are masked to look like non-affiliate links. If you do mask, how do you do it (tech details)? Currently I use a .htaccess redirect method to change the domain name only. I would also like info on how people can hack my subid to change it to theirs and steal my commissions - just so I am aware of it. Thanks!
I redirect CJ links through cart.php to make it look like a shopping cart. It makes no difference to conversions but it means you can block the search engines from viewing cart.php using robots.txt easily. That *may* make them rank you higher.
i us .htaccess just use redirect www.yoursite.com/offer http://www.affiliatelink.com/asdsd&234=sub1 when person goes to www.yoursite.com/offer they are sent through to the affiliate link
I've put together a little example in php you can use. I'm sure there are better methods, or ways to make the code a little better, but it's a start: Save the following code as: info.php For each URL to redirect to, add a place in the code below. Call info.php like: info.php?a=1 (where 1 is the first affiliate link in your code below, and 2 would be the second and so on.) <? function check_search_engine() if ($a == 1) { header("Location: http://www.affiliate.com/link.php"); exit; } { IF(!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) { $user_agent = ''; } ELSE { $user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; } $search_engines[] = 'Fast'; $search_engines[] = 'Slurp'; $search_engines[] = 'Ink'; $search_engines[] = 'Atomz'; $search_engines[] = 'Scooter'; $search_engines[] = 'Crawler'; $search_engines[] = 'bot'; $search_engines[] = 'Genius'; $search_engines[] = 'AbachoBOT'; $search_engines[] = 'AESOP_com_SpiderMan'; $search_engines[] = 'ia_archiver'; $search_engines[] = 'Googlebot'; $search_engines[] = 'UltraSeek'; $search_engines[] = 'Google'; foreach ($search_engines as $key => $value) { IF($user_agent != '') { if(strstr($user_agent, $value)) { $is_search_engine = 1; } } } IF(isset($is_search_engine)) { return TRUE; } else { return FALSE; } } ?> <? if (check_search_engine() == TRUE) { ?> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title></title> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> </head> <body> </body> </html> <? } else { $a = $_REQUEST['a']; if ($a == 1) { header("Location: http://www.affiliate.com/link1.php"); exit; } if ($a == 2) { header("Location: http://www.affiliate.com/link2.php"); exit; } if ($a == 3) { header("Location: http://www.affiliate.com/link3.php"); exit; } } ?> Code (markup):
I mask the links like this: <a href="URL" onMouseOut="window.status=' ';return true" onMouseOver="window.status='URL to display';return true">Link text</a> Works most of the time. I did find you get a better click through rate, i suppose it depends on the market your site aims at. Its bizzar that people wont click on the affiliate links isnt it?
I use the Onmouseover java snippet to display the url direct to the advertisers site. I learned this trick from adult webamsters, they swear by it. When surfers see a bunch of added code at the end of a URL they are suspisious of the link. Many more people will click when they see http:// www. domain.com versus seeing http:// www. daqocy.com/click-1972915-19239681 I am considering using the .htaccess redirect to hide the links from SE bots.
I do it using mod_rewrite. In .htaccess: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^offer$ http://blah.com/?id=00000 Code (markup): So domain.com/offer would redirect to the blah.com URL
There's an easier solution for masking and re-direct that just came out. It also organizes all your affiliate links and log-ins and tracks clicks with graphs and does ad split testing and a bunch of other stuff. I just did a big long review on my blog. http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2006/07/26/affiliate-link-organizer-cloaking/ It's only $47 - but you need to skip the hype on the sales page and just go right to the videos to see what it does. I was amazed.
Masking plain affiliate text links is pretty straightforward and simple enough - How would you say would be the best way to mask an affiliate link that involves a form and a script to post info on to the affiliate landing page? (For example, an insurance quote box affiliate offer where the lead inputs their zip code into the quote box [that is still on your page] and then clicks the submit button to go to the other site that provides the quotes [and of course receives the inputted date {zip code} from the quote box) It seems like it should be: index.html (or wherever the affilate quote box is located on site) <form method="POST" name="getQuoteForm" action="QuoteHome.php" rel="nofollow"><input type="text" name="zip" id="zip" value="Zip Code" <input type="submit" value="GO" /> </form> QuoteHome.php <? $Refby = "affiliate ID here"; $zip = $_REQUEST["zip"]; ?> And right here some kind of code to then automatically post to the landing page - this is where I am really getting kind of stuck. I think I can grasp generally speaking what I need to do but I just do not have the php experience to really put it together. Any ideas?
I thought that maybe this post here had the answer but i get the error message "Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by..."