For SEO purposes, do you cloak your links? I've heard Google may penalize you for too many affiliate links. But, I've also heard they will do the same if you have too many cloaking redirects. Anyone know a good way to cloak your clickbank links?
It's up to you to cloak links or not. If you don't want penalties from google, use rel="nofollow" attribute on all your affiliate links.
Hoplinks are ugly. A simple cloak is absolutely necessary. Here's the HTML code I use for all my affiliate links: <html> <head> <title>[B]#Product Name#[/B]</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=[B]#AFFILIATE-LINK-HERE#[/B]"> <script> url='[B]#AFFILIATE-LINK-HERE#[/B]'; if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); } else { top.location.href=url; } </script> </head> </body> </html> Code (markup): Simply make files like "productname1.html" etc., and use them on your page. Personally, Google has never penalized me for having such links. -Bhavik.
I do it all the time. Never heard anything about penalties. Have Google ever confirmed this? Sounds suspicious to me. Now cloaking for Adwords is a different matter altogether. But for simple links on my site I don't see a problem. btw I use a php redirect. That code up there is mighty ugly!
I think google hands out penalties on "sneaky redirects". Where you plug in a bunch of content on the page for the bots to read, list and rank your page in the SERPs. But you redirect to a completely unrelated page. I use PHP redirects on hops too, no problems or penalties.
Penalties? For real? Never heard of that one, but G is always fuccccing us anyway... Thanks Loco, will testing it later.
Yes... I'll cloak the click bank links. I dun want to loose my revenue by excluding my affiliate name...
np, it's a great plugin if your using wordpress here is a link to it wp-affilaite you can see an example in the first link in my sig.. you'll see links in a /scripts/ and /hosting/ directory and they redirect to my hop link, then to the spash page
Yes, outbound links quality is one of the factors of your SEO. If you have several outbound links to low quality (in Google's opinion) web sites, your site will be penalized as well.
I'm slightly surprised that so far nobody above has commented on the relative significance of the market or niche-market in discussing this subject, which always seems to be the mainstay of such discussions elsewhere. I think the argument goes that in an area like "making money online" it's absolutely essential to cloak affiliate links because in reality many of your customers will already have their own affiliate links which some of them may be able and eager to substitute for yours if they can. On the other hand, if you're selling the 3-Day Acne Cure ebook, for instance, that's comparatively unlikely to happen. (Nobody could easily or quickly benefit from becoming a CB affiliate specifically in order to do this, because of the payment parameters for new associates). So in practice it's far more worth worrying about in some niches/markets than it is in others. I think it's not difficult, in any case (and certainly doesn't even require hosting), to use a very cheap ".info" domain-name and simply forward it with masking to your CB affiliate link?
As I use my own hosting/domains for all my sites, I typically use a php redirect from a new directory for each link. But as part of a new experiment I am using Blogger. Instead of buying yet another domain, I am testing out just using the regular affiliate link. I agree, forget about it in the make money niche. But for any other niche, I reckon it won't make much difference. The kind of person who reads a typical long format sales letter and gets sucked in my all the BS marketing hype is so gullible that they ain't gonna notice an affiliate link as being suspect in the first place!! That's my theory anyway, proof will be in the testing.