I see a lot of posts about Link Cloaking, masking and URL redirection as it relates to affiliate marketing and I think there is a lot of confusion out there. I wanted to make a post briefly defining what each is and how they are used. This is by no means a SEO, PPC or affiliate marketing guide. Link Cloaking is basically when you show search engine bots one thing and humans another. Its generally regarded as Black Hat SEO to link cloak. The reason people link cloak is because they believe the search engines have fingerprinted affiliate links and if the bots see them it will hurt there organic SEO rankings and if they are doing Pay Per Click marketing that it will hurt there quality score and thus raising there prices per click. The simplest way to link cloak is by UA (user agent). Search engine bots are *supposed* to identify themselves to your website and you can programatically target them based on this UA string. Advanced link cloakers will target by IP Address. There are lists you can buy off the internet of search engine IP blocks. Link Masking is making your link look like something its not. The most common reason people mask links is to hide from humans the fact that there link is going to an affiliate offer. The deception actually happens in the status bar of the browser. When you hover over a link it shows in the status bar where the link is going to. You can disguise this to say anything you want. For instance you could disguise a link that is going to a dating affiliate eHarmony offer to look like its going to eharmony.com. This is generally done javascript. Here is some example code of masking a link: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: 1. <a href="http://www.eharmony.com/?affiliate=shoemoney" onmouseover=" window.status='http://www.eharmony.com'; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true">eHarmony</a> URL Redirection is redirecting a url using a web service or a jumpscript. A lot of times in forums I see affiliates talking about URL Redirection calling it cloaking or actually thinking it serves the same purpose as cloaking. Also people like to use it as a form of link masking... although personally I am more leary of links going through easily recognizable URL shortening services like tinyurl. Jump scripts are a little more technical way to do URL Redirection. For bloggers there are Wordpress Plugins like simple link manager ($29.95) that will handle this for you. For those php savy there is simple ways to do this in php... for example you can create an array of urls and keywords for them then call them like http://www.shoemoney.com/link.php?go=azoogleads. and in link.php we have: PLAIN TEXT PHP: 1. <?php 2. $urls = array ( 3. 'azoogleads' => 'http://c.azjmp.com/az/ch.php?f=1700&i=12&sub=affiliatecode', 4. 'xy7' => 'http://rapidresponse.directtrack.com/index.html?super_affiliate_code=affilaitecode' 5. ); 6. header ('Location: ' . $urls[$_REQUEST['go']]); 7. ?> So now you can specify noindex for this link.php file in our robots.txt and *supposedly* search engines wont see it... Organically I believe they will still see the 301 redirect so if you are doing this for SEO reasons... kind of silly. Another big reason people use URL Redirection is because they are worried about their affiliate companies stealing their PPC keywords. I will be honest this is a good reason BUT using the above mentioned methods will not shield your keywords if you are doing PPC campaigns and using these redirection scripts to the offers. Whoever is hosting the offer will see all of your keywords. The reason is because they are simple header location redirects and the browsers will carry over the referring URLs which contain all your keyword data (or whatever else refer string data there is). The only way to block the affiliate company from seeing your keywords and properly protect your direct PPC offers is to use a javascript meta refresh. BUT be careful with this with PPC because the PPC bots will not process the javascript and possibly penalize you for having zero content on your meta refresh jump script page and your PPC prices will soar for not having any matching content. A simple meta refresh page looks like this in a html file. <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.affiliate.com/?affilate=shoemoney"> So which one is best... well really depends... I just hope I helped clear some confusion in terminology. I think all can be effective if applied correctly. Also many things can be killed with one thing... for instance you could write a javascript script that pretty much does cloaking/masking and redirection. Also websites are not supposed to be penalized or passing pagerank through javascript links. [Maybe n00b stuph, but it was interesteing for me . Source: Seo Rules ]
Wow, I can not believe this guy keeps posting other peoples post. I see though that his blog is gone. I guess he might have been cut off for copyright problems.