I have read some posts that it's good to cloak the affiliate links. Why would that be needed? Just for hiding the affiliate links from visitors or also other reasons?
actually, cloaking is for redirecting the ad-spiders. for example, you want your keywords to lead the traffic to your landing page, but want to redirect the ad-spider like google adwords spider to a content website of yours to avoid fast slap. at this point, you need cloaking.
It's also so that people don't know it's an affiliate link and they won't get rid of your affiliate ID so you don't get a commission.
you dont want regular consumers to find out about the affiliate system and try to signup to take a commission off the sale that are about to send
It could be good also if you "cloak" it through a link tracking system, so that you know how many visitors you sent through. Not particularly useful information, but good to know how many are actually clicking the link.
One reason is that affiliate links are most of the time ugly, cloaking them into some user friendly form is always good. Rather then using : http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx it will be great if you have http://yoursite.com/go/tag
Would you buy if the product link was http://www.xyz.com/affid=iwillearnmoneyifyouclickonthislink though the buyer does not have to pay extra, its just a tendency we all have which prevents us from clicking on affiliate links, so cloaking the affiliate links just ensures that you get paid for the efforts you put in to get the visitor to the merchant site
Hi, That's right, the cloacking of an affiliate link serves two things. First, it helps to redirect the link and secondly it helps you protect your commission being stolen.
this way other affiliates cant steal your commissions. Plus cloaking makes it look less like an affiliate link.