Ok, here are some advanced techniqes. I did some more research since i am myself interesed in the subject. I compared a few programs and made some experiments. The goal of affiliate link cloaking can be many 1) Hide your affiliateID so links look more attractive 2) Avoid search engine penalization with many spammy looking affiliate-links 3) Avoid getting commision stolen by someone just replacing your affiliateID with his 4) Create a 1:1 clone "ghost-side" of a target-affiliate side without doing any webdesign or similiar. 5) Avoid PPC problems (Adwords!) with "similair display URL" of a competitor since you can clone ANY site to any URL of YOURS so it looks like it is a valid site which you are hosting. Possibilities are endless: You can clone clickbank hoplink pages, or amazon product pages with YOUR ID in it...and make it look like its a site hosted by you since its your URL METHODS --------- There are indeed many methods, ranging from simple PHP header redirection to playing around with .htaccess. But i wont cover those here. I compared some available link cloakers (one i couldn't get my hands on: Affiliate Link Cloaker which seems to do the same as the cloaker in ClickBank Elite. I actually do use Clickbank Elite since the cloaker in it is universal and it does exactly what i wanted...you can place an amazon URL or whatever URL in there. I chose the CB Elite cloaker since it is one ot the few which allows entering of keywords, description and even content for your "own" ghost site. (You can check my review above and see some screenshots if something is unclear). The only downside is that you have to start CB Elite and do ONE search first..then right-click on any clickbank product...the cloaker window pops up and then you can use this in whatever way you like. As an example i "magically" create a amazon-clone on some URL which could be "www.yoursite.com/niceproduct.html" Instead of a hoplink in CB Elite you just enter an amazon page with your ID, example: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000ILIMK6/YOURID-HERE (Btw. got the above style of URL with the ID appended like that from amazonhunter...but there are other ways to create links. And of course it also varies depending what program you're in. Clickbank, amazon, CJ...whatever.. You can see that you can actually enter your own keywords, title and description. CB Elite creates a encoded javascript which actually loads the target site (ijn this case some amazon site) in a frame. But i wanted to avoid being looked at weird by the search engines...so i add content to this pseudo-site. Right before the last </html> tag in the edit box i can just manually some HTML. I do this sicne the frame, the amazon-site in this case is actually not SEEN by the search-engine. In otehr words: This page doesnt have content, it just LOOKS like it would have. Good for redirection and cloaking, but if you want it more sophisticated just add some article or whatever. This is actually seen by the search-engines. Yes...we're very much dealing with black-hat here since if you go on the created site you do only see the amazon-site and not the article or what i added below. The searchengine sees only some encoded script...and then the article you added The fun about that method now is that you save this right from CB Elite (or affiliate link cloaker, which i did NOT test!) as an .HTML. Say massagechair.html Upload this on your server like i did here http://www.1up-seo.com/massagechair.html Now if you go there you see nothing else than an amazon site, but look at the URL, the keywords and descriptions. It's mine. Also...if you look at the source code of this site...you dont see anything but my Subtitle and some article which you can put in there regarding the product. Why is this good ? As said: It's "advanced" cloaking since the frame is encoded, you can have your own keywords and description and whatever you want to add...and any site you want you can clone and make a pseudo-site on any of your URLs in a matter of minutes. If you want to promote any affiliate-program...do this and in 1 minute or two you have your "own" site Georg.
Part II: The above method is certainly black-hat SEO, but how you implement this and what programs you use is up to you. I was playing around a bit and used a clickbank product as example, here i used adword analyzer since i get hits on that once in a while. The goal: Creating a fake, cloaked site which has keyword-rich content regarding to "adword analyzer"...in the hope that the search engine pick this up. What did i do ? I used the method in above article and created a very simple PHP script which looks like this: -------------------- <html><head><title>Adword Analyzer - Great tool for checking your competition and for keyword research</title><META Name="Description" Content="Buy adword analyzer here - use it for spying on your adwords competition"><META Name="Keywords" Content="adword analyzer, adwords analyzer, adwordanalyzer, keywords, keyword research"></head><script language=javascript>document.write(unescape('%3c%66%72%61[CUT]20%72%6%73%65%74%3e'));</script><noscript></noscript> <body> <?PHP $t="article.html"; $HTML = file_get_contents($t); echo $HTML; echo "<BR>"; $t="menu.html"; $HTML = file_get_contents($t); echo $HTML; ?> </body> </html> -------------------- you can see that the header and all that above is actually a cloak-redirect, in this case i link to one of my own "clone sites" which is a site promoting adword-analyzer. As said: You cn use any URL with your affID and cloak/direct to any site of your liking. Below the part which was created with clickbank elite /the cloaker in CB Elite)i added some primitive PHP code which loads two templates: An article which i just grabbed somewhere....and then a menu template with "Contact Us", "Privacy Policy" and "Terms of Service". What the search engine sees now is actually something 100% different from what you see on the page: (you can check for yourself - or look on G for "spider simulator" and you can see how a SE actually sees the page. You see a pitch-page promoting adword-elite.....but the SE sees a page with an article/review and proper contact_us.html, privacy_policy and TOS As said that is as black-hat as it goes and i certainly do not recommend Adsense or similiar on such a site ! But there might be a good chance that the engines pick up the article..and you get hit hits and rankings in the SE....for a site which is actually some clone of some pitch-site This is really, really expandanable for someone having basic knowledge of PHP. A future idea would be a program where you just select any pitch-page for clickbank or amazon-product or whatever....and you enter a keyword, description and more for the "new" site. automatic search engine friendly article is generated regarding to the keyword...and then the whole thing is uploaded to your server.