There’s a number of reasons why you’d want to cloak your affiliate links. The first is so that cheap webmasters can’t get the string & buy the product through their own link instead of yours. Secondly, you don’t want to make the links too obvious to your readers as some will just not buy through an affiliate link period.I’m going to look at two fairly easy ways to cloak your affiliate links. The first one involves a redirection script which holds an unlimited amount of URL’s. The second is slightly more time intensive, however it has extra advantages.

Mass Affiliate Link Redirection

This particular method allows you to keep all your affiliate URL’s in one php file. You can assign each URL a name, then call it whenever you want.

Create a .php file & call it redirect.php
Open up the file & insert the following code:

$links = array(
"earnersblog" =>; "http://www.earnersblog.com",
);
header("Location:".$links[$_GET['site']]);
exit;
?>
You can replace Earners Blog & the URL with whatever you want. You can also add as many other URL’s below this one as you want.

To call one of the links you need to call it using the name you’ve described it as. To call the link above we’d use the string:

http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?site=earnersblog

And there you have a very simple Mass Affiliate Link redirect script that can hold an unlimited number of URL’s.

Single Affiliate Link Redirection

I use this method to redirect single affiliate links. The advantages of using this method is that if you point enough link juice on the affiliate link you can sometimes get it to rank in MSN. This can mean free commissions from organic clicks. The url structure also looks much cleaner which will attract more clickthroughs.

Say I want to create a file to redirect to Earners Blog. Simply create a file called earnersblog.php

Inside the file place the following code:

header( 'Location: http://www.earnersblog.com' ) ;
?>
Now when you want to call the link just use http://www.yoursite.com/earnersblog.php

As you can see, using this method makes the link look much more like a static page. Therefore your reader is more likely to click & possibly buy. If you’re consistent & use this linking method throughout your site for external affiliate links you may find some of them ranking in MSN. This is generally dependant on the Anchor text you decide to use for the link.

Until next time.

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