That's the biggest problem for me now. I can't decide should I cloak my links or not... As someone has already said on the forum - any experienced affiliate marketer would replace the affiliate ID to get the commission for the sale instead of giving it to you. The only reason that I think cloaking is good, because it makes the links more clickable...However, I believe that an average internet surfer, wouldn't mind clicking on Clickbank's hoplink as well, because it looks like a normal link to most of the surfers. So this brings me to a decision not to cloak the hoplinks. Plus the search engines react "strange" to redirects.. I don't know why, but my pages got deindexed few days ago, when I used php redirect on those pages. After I changed everything to tinyurl.com seems that pages are coming back to Google. I am kinda scared to use any kind of redirect now...For now, I think that leaving the hoplinks as they are is the best solution. What do you guys think about cloaking the hoplinks?
As I said in the other thread - I use php redirects and I'm perfectly indexed (even in some high positions). This also allows me to change one page instead of changing tens of links in many pages. Hoplinks are redirects just like php. nadavs
bl4ckmaN^, what exactly got deindexed? that page that is linked to by php redirect or the page that has links to php redirects? However I don't really see how can it be connected. I use php redirects and I also disallow robots to index my redirect pages. For two reasons: 1) it's useless and I'd rather have SE index some page with content on my website 2) I'm not sure if it will be considered and outlink to the destination site by SE. But if it is and the site gets marked as spam you site will be penalized as well for linking to it. I ran a poll on the matter of replacing affiliate IDs as while back and there was a number of people who said that they wouldn't do it by the way. When I run PPC campaigns I cloak (using Meta-Refresh) for several reasons: 1) Makes it next to impossible for tools like Keyword Spy to pick up keywords that I use 2) I'm not tempting publisher to compete with me by not showing him what kind of PPC keywords I use. Since publisher gets 100% from direct sales he/she can bid higher and still have the same profit margin.
karabas, nadavs Let me explain it on example I got a page www.example.com/mypage, I promoted a product there and want to include my hoplink to the publisher's page. So I created www.example.com/productname on my ftp server and uploaded to that folder index.php with the following coding: After that, I had my page www.example.com/mypage deindexed from Google....It was there before, so the only reason that I can think about is the php redirect that I used. BTW that redirect is suggested by Clickbank. Someone also said that Google won't index the page where this link is used, because it will classified as permanently moved page
I would think that this is a coincidence. Pages come and go on my websites from time to time. /prodcutname never shows in the SERP - true. But google still needs to crawl it to figure out what it is. I'd create robots.txt and put Disallow /productname there
karabas What about if I use the following html redirect? <html> <head> <title>Loading page...</title> <meta name = "robots" content = "noindex,nofollow"> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net"> </head> </html>
bl4ckmaN^, I don't cloak my affiliate links. But in order to answer this for yourself, you have to ask yourself: What is my niche? If your niche has anything to do with web design, Internet marketing, or computers in general, then I'd say cloak your links. People who buy these kinds of products know how affiliate marketing works and they might try to replace the affiliate ID with their own. BUT, if you're selling stuff that relates to gardenings, puppies, karate, cars, food, or any other non-computer-related niche, then I wouldn't bother cloaking your links. These are average people who don't know or care how affiliate marketing works. They won't try to steal your sale. That's my take on it anyway.
That's what I use for all of my traffic and that's how www.cloakreferer.com works. At first I was a bit worried that this will not work properly in all browsers or something like that and my conversions will go down. But months passed and my conversions were not affected. So I guess that it works properly.
Good Explanation. I too agree with your opinion. Only those who are connected to IM, internet and computer related products, would know about hop links.
fireboat Agree, but in this case cloaking the links won't save my commissions, because it's not a problem to find the publisher's ID and change the affiliate ID So that's why I am thinking that,basically,cloaking is useless in terms of saving sales. The only benefit, as I said before, is that cloaked hoplinks look more attractive than simple hoplinks.