How to cloak your affiliate links

As affiliate you need to know how to cloak your links.

Why should you cloak your links?

The average internet user and the search engines are getting smarter everyday. When you don’t cloak your links, it is possible for your visitors or the search engines to notice the affiliate link.

It is not likely that it will scare your visitor away, but it’s always better to be safe then sorry.

Let’s get started

We need to create a file called htaccess.

With this file you can redirect your links.

Step 1:

Open up a text editor ( Readme, text edit etc )

Then add the following piece of coding:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^visit/whatever http://yourid.product.hop.clickbank.net/ [L,NC]

Let me explain this a bit more.

RewriteEngine On = Turning on rewriting on your host/server.

^visit/whatever = What you will type in your web browser. In this case: yourdomain.com/visit/whatever

http://yourid.product.hop.clickbank.net/ = The affiliate link you are cloaking.

[L,NC] = Something to do with ending the rewrite, whatever just add it.

Step 2:

Save this file as:

.htaccess

Then simply upload this to your public html folder.

Conclusion:

Now when you visit the following link:

yourdomain.com/visit/whatever

It will handle it as your affiliate link.

Simple wasn’t it? Now your visitors and the search engines will think it’s part of your website.

I also recommend adding nofollow tags, and adding /visit to your robots.txt file with the line Disallow: /visit/. I might cover this in the next article.