Should you hide your affiliate links?

Do you get better conversions when you "hide" your affiliate links, or does it really matter? I was thinking about using this url redirect software to hide my links.

http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/0180.shtml

 

You can use .htaccess on your hosting account to hide your links if you have a website.

 

may be, there is no need to hide affilate link, because most of affilate link saved the referal id in Cokkies so may be there is no need to do hide them

 

I believe that you should be honeost with the people on your site and not hide the link.

I think that that would be a better idea to have them trust you.

~ Mike

 

There is an interesting post I have written before a couple of weeks based on a personal experiment and I saw that by hiding my affiliate link I got more conversions

Check the post -> http://www.olgizenullari.com/why-how-to-mask-your-affiliate-links/

 

I've never seen a difference in conversion ratios between masked and unmasked affiliate links, but I have seen higher CTRs when using masked links. I mask all of my affiliate links now. Also, I'm not sure if there is any truth to it but I have a theory that having affiliate links on a page can negatively affect that page's ranking, in which case it would obviously be very beneficial to mask your affiliate links.

 

Hmmm..........That's interesting. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

i use this sample code on all my website's banners...

it uses the onClick event to change the url so users will see no aff link before they click the banner...

code is as follows...

<a href="http://www.ciao.com" onclick="this.href='www.ciao.com/reg.php?FriendId=10023163'" target="_blank">join here</a>

after posting the message i read on another site it is not advisable as js is disabled by some users...

 

Its always better to hide or cloak affiliate link,specially if u r in IM niche.

 

definitively....i don't like when it shows YOURID.hop.clickbank.net <--- ugliest links ever. And yes, especially in the IM niche i can see this being a problem.

 

I think you should. I have a friend who will purposely go to a site without going through the affiliate link. I don't know if she does this so others wont get credit or because it looks ugly or she is paranoid. She says she never click on a link if it has tinyurl or something other than the website name.

 

Like I wrote in my other thread "Some people won't go to a ClickBank link when they can see an affiliate's code embedded into the url. Worse still link hijackers can replace your nickname with their own and steal your commission!" so better be careful about that too!

 

If people see your link in a post or email, they just won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection, hiding links WILL increase your CTR.