Masking will redirect a certain URL to another one... Affiliate programs tend to give the affiliates long and suspicious-looking URLs. With masking, the affiliate links will be 'hidden' and your visitors will not think that they're affiliate links. Because of this, your CTR will improve and you'll earn more money! I have posted three methods to mask your affiliate links. Link: Methods to Mask Your Affiliate Links The methods are easy to follow, so choose the one that you like the most. Here are some questions for you: 1. Do you mask your affiliate links? 2. If you do, which method do you use? To those who will use and experiment with all the methods I've listed, please post here and tell us which of them has the highest CTR. P.S. Please comment on the post if you have the time. Thanks!
I already use php redirect method, where i add redirect in a new page and use that page to link those affiliate keywords. Thanks for your post.
I've been using the "mysite.com/go/affiliateprogram.php" kind of method. You don't even need to do any scripting if you get this: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/redirect-outgoing-affiliate-links/
i prefer the PHP method, never thought about .htaccess for that purpose nice blog! I have another: The cloaking via JScript which loads a page into a frame. The JScript is escaped/encrypted. I talked about in my review of clickbank elite since it uses this method. All those methods might have advantages and disadvantges. In the case of the JScript cloaking it used a frame (not so good) but then you can have your own page title, description and keywords.
I would actually reccommend this free script - http://www.phpjunkyard.com/php-click-counter.php Not only can you mask any of your affiliate URLs, you can also use it to monitor any local URLs as well. It provides quite useful statistics as well if you want to monitor how many times links have been clicked etc as well
Great script Claudek, thanks for sharing... is there a WP plugin version of that or something? It'll really help the bloggers.
I've used that before and every so often I'd get errors depending on what characters were used in the affiliate link... so I just switched methods and everything worked like a charm
I am wonder if ask a stupid question here, I tried my best to search yet to find a good answer,... I build a site http://www.lowpricesms.com recently for my sms biz, and my I need to mask my supplier's URL so that customer will not go direct to them. I am trying to mask the http://lowpricesms.supplier_domain.com with http://www.lowpricesmsn.com/member. When my customer click on the ../member link, it will show them to http://lowpricesms.supplier_domain.com to log in their account. The point here is I do not want the customers to see the supplier link. I tried redirect but with that the customer still seeing the supplier domain... Any suggestion?
The customer is always going to see the suppliers domain when they reach the final destination of your affiliate link. That is just the way it works. The only way around it is frames or iframes. But I don't recommed either as you would probably be breaking the T&C's of your affiliate program.
I'm wondering - does the masking of the links impact your SEO? Do you also use a "nofollow" tag to mask your links for search engine rank bots? Or does the act of masking benefit your SEO and page rank? If anyone can comment on these methods and search engine results that'd be amazing. Thanks!
I place all my affiliate links in a single folder and disallow that folder via a robots.txt file. No need to have Google following or attempting to index the links, as that could piss them off. But it doesn't affect your SEO other than that Google would prefer that your site was more than a list of affiliate links.