Do you mask your affiliate links?

htaccess FTW!

 

All you need for this to work properly in a .htaccess setup is something like this, correct?

Redirect 301 /offer http://www.affiliatesite.com/click-code-here

 

JJ Try this

http://www.alt-php-faq.org/local/55/#id55

 

.htaccess works fine for all of my other text links and will even work for this situation but the problem that I run into is that the post data (zip code) does not carry forward.

thanks Mad4 - this I think is on the right track - I will try and see if I can figure it out and give it a try!

 

Always mask your URLs

We did a bulk-mailing A/B split test, sending a total of 500,000 email messages to a group of qualified double opt-in leads with two link options.

Group #1 got a link that looked like this:
http:// spilnk.com / ?a=103x93x17&u=4x12

Group #2 got a link that looked like this:
http:// recyber.net / designationmp.html

CTR for group #1 was 7%
CTR for group #2 was 21%

That's 3-times the number of clicks.

We contacted 10 members of group #1 and asked why they didn't click on the link. The response was always in the lines of "oh it seemed suspicious" or "oh it looked like it will track me"

When presenting links to your users, always KISS.

 

A Visual Guide to Affiliate Link Cloaking

 

just wondering .. does this site work for you guys?
http://www.addme.com/linkcloaker.htm

It doesn't seem to really cloak the links I add in..

 

I hate to resurrect an old thread but . . .

What does

 header("Location: http://www.affiliate.com/link.php");

Code (markup):

do? Should that be the url of my site?

Thanks

 

This code redirect you to the url which is given.

 

I don't think I was clear in my question. I understand that later in the code it sends to the link - ie. 1 = whatever and so on.

I am guessing that the first couple lines of code are meant to send the search engines somewhere but where? Do I put my url there?

Thanks for the help.

 

For sure the easiest way.

 

So, once you masked the link, what is the best way to redirect ?

Just a simple Header("Location: $link") or should you also send a 301 or 302 status-code ?

 

My affiliate links look something like this:

mysite.com/products/viagra123.html
mysite.com/products/ebook456.html

The numbers are just tracking codes used for AB testing or other stuff.

Did a htaccess rewrite so that all uri that begins with "product" are processed by redirect.php

redirect.php does a lookup then 302 redirect to affiliate site. I think a 302 (temp redirect) is better because you can switch your affiliate links anytime. If you use 301, browsers will cache the affiliate urls.

And make sure you robot.txt the "product" path or make the affiliate links nofollow so that you're not leaking PR juice to your affiliates.

 

Thanks. This is exactly what I am doing now, but I have seen other sites sending a 301, so I really had some doubt what was the best.

 

What about if you have 1,000 or more links. What about if you have a product price comparison that has 1,000,000 products. Would that mean that you have to write 1,000,000 if statements in the php code?

 

Well, here is a script you could use to redirect Google Bot:-

$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if (eregi("google", $agent)) {header("HTTP/1.1 301?);
header("Location: [url]http://path.com/to-your-new-page);[/url]
exit(); }

HTML: