Best Way To Mask CJ Affiliate Links?

Hi there,

When browsing some websites it appears that Commission Junction affiliate links are masked - and when you scroll over the link, the scroll bar displays the address as http://www.xyz.com - without the messy affiliate link showing at all.

I was just wondering, how is this done? I'm sure that they aren't simply linking directly to the website because they would miss out on a lot of affiliate revenue...


Thanks for any help.

 

You can mask the links when creating the link code in CJ. It's just using mouseover code.

 

Say you are linking them to a new book (harry potter for example)

You can open your htaccess folder and on a new line put

Redirect 301 /harry-potter-book http://www.your cj affiliate code here.

so if your site was www.xyz.com and you posted a link www.xyz.com/harry-potter-book it would forward them to the affiliate page.

 

How to mask url showing in status bar ?

 

Yes - instead of the CJ affiliate link (http://www.cjaffiliatelink.com/ref=1234567etc) I would prefer if it showed the link of the main site (http://www.xyz.com).

How do you mask the link within CJ?

Thanks for the help so far.

 

Man, that's so simple. I usually do a mod_rewrite.. but that is perfect!

hanji

 

Using javascript. Here is an example anchor tag...

<a href="http://rover.ebay.com/yadda/yadda" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.ebay.com'; return true;">Your link text or image</a>

Code (markup):

hanji

 

Where is the javascript here Hanji ? Is this the only code needed ?

 

Yep, the onmouseover event is handling the window.status() which is the status bar.

hanji

 

Thanks a lot hanji, this is great.

I think this is what the other sites must have been doing, stupidly I forgot to have a look at their code.

Can I still add the rel="nofollow" command after the <a href="http://xyz.com" ?

Thanks

 

Yep!

hanji

 

Izzit ok if i mask the link like this: http://yousite.com/go/product1 instead of using cj code?

 

u can use tinyurl{dot} com .

 

Can I just ask quickly - does this only work when the page is online? When I preview in offline mode the URL isn't actually masked...

 

I find this working in IE browser only, not in Firefox (in Firefox it doesn't show anything). But I think it's fine, as most potential customers are using IE.

 

New to forum and to this subbject.

We have an affiliate program and would like to provide our affiliates the ability to mask their affiliate referral id that link to us.

Example:

Source (affiliate's site): http://www.MyDomain.com/ProductID.html
Target (our site) http://www.MyDomain.com/ProductID.html/?&AFFIL=123456

Basically add "/?&AFFIL=" to the end of any link that links our site.

Thanks, Jerry

 

Just mod_rewrite this stuff. It's much more convenient if you have many affiliate programs you promote.

 

that's a pain in the ass, I personally wouldn't want to 301 like 200 URLs!!

 

Why not..... takes time but it's the best method