First...I just found this site and I am glad to be here. So far, I have seen some good posts. One topic that has caught my eye is affiliate hijacking. I am new to affiliate marketing and have recently purchased an affiliate directory website. It is written in PHP, with a mysql database on teh backend. While I have experience with html, PHP has a bit of a learning curve. I am currently eperimenting with my site. No affiliates have actually been set up as of yet. I am just testing. One thing I have noticed is that if I place my cursor on the active affiliate link, nothing is revealed on my site that the actual link is affiliate related (in the the URL or status bar). I believe this is because the info is dynamically being created. That is good. However, if I were to click on the link, I then land on the affiliate partner's page, with my affiliate code exposed. How can I control this so that the id portion of the link is hidden, while still retaining the affiliation behind the scenes? Is this possible, or, can you only cloak the affiliate link only on your website, and not all the way through to the actual affiliate partner's site? In case anyone is interested, my site is at www.practicesite.info Thanks everyone.
You can only cloak the affiliate link on the target site if that site allows it. ClixGalore.com affiliate program has such options. Don't know about others PS Welcome to DP
p.s. in your case the links are being "cloaked" i.e. not showing up in the status bar because of javascript, not php.
You could open the page in your main frame, if you are using frames that is. However this will not work if the affiliate partner site is using site firewall software.
Manage Affiliate Links allows you to cloak your affiliate links and remove the affiliate session id and data. Example: http://www.merchant-site.com/?r=32wjklasdf With Manage Affiliate Links: http://www.merchant-site.com/ Also, cloaks all your links and redirects dead links. Also check out http://www.hidemyaffiliatelink.com/