Do you cloak Amazon affiliate links which you use in your web sites ? I wonder if it's against their TOS or not. I read in another forum this can be used for suppressing link mashers which swap you affiliate links with their own.
No, because Google is smart) You can't hide all amazon images, prices, descriptions, links. Any redirects to Amazon will show your affiliate links - so, don't cloak.
Agreed, even though you are doing this for your own benefit and not for any other reason G does not like cloaked links.
I never cloak links. In fact, I earn more because my visitors know they're supporting my site. They happily comment and let me know they will keep on buying from my Amazon and other links.
In general there isn't anything bad in masking links, it's totally different from what Google defines as cloaking. Masking is a simple redirect, cloaking would mean showing Google a different version of a site than the actual visitors.
I think you miss the point, though. When you cloak an affiliate link, you can make it shorter instead of some long ugly affiliate link, so the visitor has no idea its an affiliate link. Even though it redirects to Amazon, it should help increase conversions. Also, if you are promoting a specific product which you promote frequently in different blog posts, its much quicker to use the cloaked URL.
I was told to in the first course about Amazon that I read, but then realised it was not necessary. After some experiments, I found that not cloaking the link give better result.
I'm pretty new, but when I create a song affiliate link their is an option to shorten url and use http://amzn.to/xxxxxxx
But Amazon also cloak their own links. They have a Twitter feature to create shortened links to share on Twitter.
yup that is the one I'm talking about as well. the only downside or upside is that their short url amzn.to is run under bit.ly, so anybody with google chrome extension bit. ly (or similar extension on firefox) can see the real link and how many times someone has clicked it on.