i was waiting for somebody to say this if you are promoting dog training guides its not a big drama.. but if you were promoting aff marketing products then its more important.. in the case of aff link theft anyway. either way its a simple thing to do, so may as well do it all the time because it looks more professional.
I'm launching a new product soon for advanced cloaking of links for this very purpose. PM me if you want to get in on beta testing
I agree. Digitally downloadable products ( unless the merchant forbids a publisher buying through their own link ) cannot be protected by cloaking. Once a buyer gets to the payment page, and see's it's CB, it takes a few minutes to clear the cookies and get a discount!
I guess it it just to have a nicer link and to make it difficult for affiliate thief to steal your commissions. But since everybody is doing it, I will just follow the crowd. You can learn how to do so by visiting my blog.
I always cloak my affiliate links too, not just for clickbank products but others as well. Like others have said, it just looks nicer this way.
I do some volume with CB. When I first went there (about a year ago) I did not cloak my links. And I noticed a slow decline in sales over time. I was not sure if it was conversion attrition or someone stealing sales. So I began to cloak and broke each site into a separate campaign. Immediately after I noticed a bump in conversion. However, the campaigns did not return to their old form, they were still quite a bit lower. So, I was never positive if it was something or nothing. My suggestion is, it is a relatively simple fix so do it. If for no other reason than to help you go to sleep at night.
The easiest way I find is to add this line to .htaccess redirect 301 /folder http://youraffiliatelink.com Code (markup): Whereby "folder" is just some virtual directory on your site. This just sets up a permanent 301 redirect to the affiliate link, which is the best solution for SEO.
Yeah, I use Php redirect as well. And the Serp's index your PHP pages as well. It's cool! If you need a PHP tutorial, head on Jeremy Palmer's Blog, and search for: PHP Tutorial. He has a really nice video.
Never tried the 301. I used to use PHP, but I swapped it for html iframes because I could not get Google's website optimizer to work with a PHP redirect. It works with the iframe.
So are these the same things you're describing here or not? (I'm leaning towards not). Which one is the better of the two and I'll do that one.
I use redirecting option in my hosting Cpanel, but I don't know how to track the CTR, how to do that?
Your right kiplarson, htaccess and php redirect are two different methods. My own software, ninja link cloaker is only 5 days from launch, PM me if you want to get in on beta testing it for free & or JVing in the launch
Just use a simple html redirect script: Copy to notepad and edit site url, and then save as html. Simple.