Free Affiliate Link Cloaking

Affiliate link cloaking isn’t as difficult as you may think.

But you may be thinking what is affiliate link cloaking and why would you want to cloak affiliate links in the first place.

Here’s my newbie friendly definition:-

Cloaking your affiliate link basically means hiding the raw affiliate code you get from the affiliate network and instead displaying a more attractive link like http://www.richardpargeter.com/recommends/aproduct.php

You want to do this because:-

1. It’s more attractive

2. People can’t steal your commissions as easily

3. Naked affiliate links look dodgy

4. Google doesn’t like pages stuffed with affiliate links

To cloak your affiliate link you need a redirect script which is so simple to do you’ll wonder why people actually pay money for products to do it for them, when they can quite easily do it themselves with a text editor.

Here’s the code you’ll need:-

<?php header(Location:'YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK-GOES-HERE');?>

Replace the YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK-GOES-HERE with the actual code you get from the affiliate network and save it something like specialoffer.php

You have to make sure that you save the file as a PHP file otherwise it won’t work.

Finally you need to upload the file to your domain server and pop it in a folder. You can name the folder anything you like, I use ‘recommends’.

Now when someone goes to www.YOURDOMAIN.com/recommends/specialoffer.php they will be redirected to the affiliate offer.

Affiliate link cloaking is as easy as that, all that is left to do is add the affiliate code to your website.