The topic of link cloaking is surrounded by a lot of confusion. Lots of Internet marketers cloak their outgoing links but, to some people, it’s a mystery why links are being cloaked at all.
First, what’s a cloaked link?
From the end user point of view, a cloaked link is usually a prettier/shorter version of an uglier/longer link.
Hover with your mouse over this ugly Amazon Associates link and notice what appears on your browser’s status bar. With the use of link cloaking plugins, it is possible to send the user to your affiliate link but through a prettier shorter link like this.
From a technical point of view, a cloaked link simply redirects to another link. So, you supply a pretty/short version of a link to the user and when the user clicks on that link, a software on your server redirects the user to the ugly/long version of the URL.
From the blogger or website owner point of view, link cloaking makes it much easier to manage, remember, and protect links. That’s where the real benefits of link cloaking are as I will explain shortly.
The Benefits of Link Cloaking
Link cloaking helps you:
- create human friendly links that are easy to remember
- update and change old links without editing old content
- track statistics of clicks on your affiliate links
- manage how search engines index your content
- prevent other people from stealing your affiliate commissions
- get more clicks because users are more likely to click on prettier/shorter links
Be Able to Remember Your Affiliate Links
For example, I don’t have to go look up my affiliate link for the WP Review Site plugin, it is: http://wp4im.com/visit/wpreviewsite/. Having cloaked that link made it easy for me to remember and give out my affiliate link on the fly.
Update and Change Your Affiliate Links Efficiently
Occasionally, products that you’re affiliated with will implement new link formats. When that happens, you might have to go through your old content and update the links manually — not if you’re using a helpful link cloaking plugin. Usually, link cloaking plugins will have an options page where you can setup your redirections from pretty links to ugly ones. You setup the redirection once, and then whenever you want to send users to your affiliate links, you give out the pretty version.
Now when the affiliate programs changes up on you, you can simply go to your options page and update the link there. All those people and your old content that’s using the pretty version will now be redirected to the updated link.
Track Statistics
If you’re sending users directly to your affiliate links, you wouldn’t be able to tell how many people clicked on the link. However, if you first send them through a link that you control, you can see how many redirects were made, which tells you how many people clicked on the “outgoing” link. Powerful link cloaking plugins usually have the ability to keep stats like this.
Manage How Search Engines Index Your Content
For better SEO performance, it is advisable that you tell search engines not to crawl or try to index your affiliate links. To do that, you can add the rel="nofollow" attribute to your links’ HTML. It is, however, inconvenient to have to do that manually with every affiliate link. Link cloaking plugins can automatically add rel="nofollow" to your affiliate links.
Another advisable technique to prevent search engines from stumbling over your affiliate links is to use robots.txt. If you’re not familiar with robots.txt, this maybe a little extra for you, but basically cloaked affiliate links are usually stored in a virtual folder, like /visit/ or /goto/. Using robots.txt, you can tell search engines not to try to crawl or index anything in those virtual directories. *Feel free to ask for more info on this in the comments*
Prevent People from Stealing Your Commission
Another reason that’s frequently mentioned in support of link cloaking is preventing commission theft. It is indeed some what helpful to prevent commission theft with link cloaking, but it’s not entirely effective.
Many Internet marketers who are promoting ClickBank products struggle with the fact that ClickBank explicitly allows users to use their own affiliate links, and that effectively deprives marketers from their rightful earnings. That’s why those marketers try to prevent users from knowing the final destination of the link.
Link cloaking plugins come with various mechanisms, such as the use of iFrames, to help with this problem.
Users are More Likely to Click on Prettier Links
This is yet another reason that’s cited in support of link cloaking, but I don’t know how true it is. Do most people really care what a link looks like? Anyway, at least this is a side benefit of using a link cloaking plugin — get prettier links!
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That’s all. I hope to have explained to you what the benefits of link cloaking exactly are and why you need to start cloaking your links.
