confused on link cloaking

[marymac]

Hi,

I searched the forum for info on link cloaking but still have a question. Can you cloak a link without uploading it to a website. I just wanted to make an affiliate link more appealing for posting elsewhere like facebook etc.
Thanks
Mary

[pamb10]

Mary, for my most often used affiliate links I modified the htaccess file with a line similar to this:

Redirect 301 /easyplr http://www.easyplr.com/go.php?af=1345388

This will redirect all from www.shopnicheplr.com/easyplr to the aforementioned affiliate link. This method must be done online.

There are some WP plugins to handle these type of links. I think one of the popular ones is called Pretty Links. It must be done on your site, so the redirection can occur. You can also use services such as the link shorteners, like bit.ly and the like.

Hope this helps.
Pam

[SueP]

I use bit.ly and have never had a problem with it.

[marymac]

Thanks Pam. It's still a little confusing for me. I think for now I'll just stick with bitly

mary

[angienewton]

From what I understand, bitly or other shorteners are not good when it comes to SEO purposes but I'm not sure as I don't use those. I would set up your redirects like Lynn does (here she shows an example on how to set up redirects for affiliate links (http://www.clicknewz.com/828/3-ways-to-stay-on-top-of-the-ever-changing-affiliate-landscape/)).

[marymac]

Thanks Angie! I'll look at that

[ChristineCobb]

There is a difference between redirecting and cloaking. Redirecting is used to make an ugly affiliate link look pretty. Like Pam mentioned above, she creates a nice looking link to display that goes to another affiliate link when clicked. Once you get to the final webpage, the url that displays in the address bar is controlled by the affiliate program that is being used by the merchant.

Cloaking on the other hand starts out like a redirect link but when you get to the final webpage, the url in the address bar is the same as the url that was clicked.

So if you click example.com/mylink, the redirect would go to and display merchantsite.com whereas the cloaked link goes to merchantsite.com but the address bar displays example.com/mylink.

Many people buy domain names for the express purpose of forwarding them to an affiliate link. For example http://ExploreMyNAMS.com redirects to my affiliate link for the NAMS program. Instead of just redirecting, I could also mask or cloak the name so that when you clicked on it and land on the NAMS page, you would see ExploreMyNAMS.com in the address bar instead of MyNAMS.com.

I have not done testing to say for sure, but I have heard, that cloaking sometimes messes with some affiliate cookie systems so you don't get credit. For that reason, I avoid cloaking my redirected affiliate links.

[mleejr]

Hello Marymac

I would say if you are a WordPress user try the plugin named pretty link lite.

Pretty link allows you to cloak your link with the keyword you are targeting.

So for instance if your keyword is dog training, than pretty link will allow you to use the dog training as the name of your cloaked link.

You do not need to upload it to a website.

Hope this helps,
Martin

[masonworld]

I second the Pretty Link lite recommendation

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link/

And agree that Pretty Links and Cloaking are 2 different things.