hide affiliate links?

gellnsh · #1 (**permalink**) 04-11-2007, 08:26 PM

Hello,

I came across a site today that used an interesting technique to hide affiliate links and ids. They used some type of 'GET' form method that went something like the following:

<form method="get" action="/search">

<label>Search <input type="text" name="searchString" /></label> <input type="submit" value="Go" class="button" /></p>
</form>

<select name="foofoo" onchange="document.location.href=this.value">
<option value=""> --- Find poker room review --- </option>
<option value="/my-place">1. My Place </option>

Is anyone familiar with this technique? It looks like it could be a great way to hide your affiliate links.

If you can help me out or point me to where I might be able to learn how to do this, I would appreciate it.

thanks

calenquick · #2 (**permalink**) 04-12-2007, 09:31 AM

What I always use the Affiliate Link Masker tool.

Simply enter your affiliate link and it will generate html codes that you can paste into a blank web page.

When you send visitors to this page, your affiliate link is hidden. Simple, no need to know how to use all these codes.

PM me if you want the free tool. :)

calenquick · #3 (**permalink**) 04-13-2007, 04:22 AM

Hi gellnsh,

Please check your PM for the link to the free tool.

:)

StephenR. · #4 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 04:24 AM

A lot of you already do this but why don't you just create a .php file? Open up notepad, insert the below code (adding your affiliate link), name the file anynameyouwant.php and load it up to your webserver. Then just use the anynameyouwant.php file for the affiliate URL.

Code:

<?php
header("Location:http://www.put-your-affiliate-link-here.com/");
?>

jackpowers · #5 (**permalink**) 05-13-2007, 11:58 PM

I use this

<html>
<head>
<title>Please wait! Loading ...</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=http://youraffiliatelink.com
<script>
url='http://youraffiliatelink.com;
if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); }
else { top.location.href=url; }
</script>
</head>
<body>Please wait! Loading .....
</body>
</html>

arconius · #6 (**permalink**) 05-16-2007, 09:39 PM

Nice post just what I was looking for.

ezdozit · #7 (**permalink**) 06-14-2007, 08:09 PM

Hey All:

Great discussion. Will the above work if I (a new affiliate) want to broker an advertisers' offer to a network? My ad managment tool is still a few weeks out, but I want to start brokering now.

How would I hide the advertisers' code from the networks I approach?

fastcart11 · #8 (**permalink**) 06-19-2007, 12:40 PM

I just do the old 0 sec. meta refresh...

Airline Tickets Antiques Apartments Car Accessories Cell Phone Deals at Whatever.com

when they click it, it'll go right to zeropage.htm which
is a 0 second view that redirects them to the aff
page...

similar to technique used above. Always worked
well..

FC

Webnauts · #9 (**permalink**) 06-26-2007, 12:10 PM

Maybe something like this? PHP Affiliate Jump Script - How to create an Affiliate Link jump script in PHP
And disallow the jump.php script in the robots.txt?

d1srupt3r · #10 (**permalink**) 10-12-2007, 10:54 PM

Hi! Thanks for sharing your methods of hiding your affiliate link. Let me share mine. I use Zoom!Us.To service. zoom.us.to offers a custom URL that redirects where you want. It works like tinyurl.com but zoom.us.to offers a custom URL for everyone's convenient. It is good utility in hiding affiliate link.

darsh999 · #11 (**permalink**) 10-17-2007, 08:44 AM

You can hide the links by creating a mouse over . While this system does not stop the removal of your affilate referral number then it does hide it a little more than if nothing was done.
The mouse over step is the best wayadded when inserting your links.

shyspinner · #12 (**permalink**) 10-23-2007, 01:36 PM

Hello everyone. I was going to make a new post to ask my question, but thought I would ask on this post since it is semi-relevant.

So, I have never added any affiliate links to my site ever before, and I am totally new to this type of thing.

I chose a couple of affiliate arrangements I was happy with, and added the links to my site, some on the sidebar, some as part of content that is related to the product. Fine and dandy.

I have read about affiliate url hijacking though, in my reading / learning travels and need to learn how to combat that practice?
Would I need some sort of encrypter to scramble my affiliate links to stop hijacking?

The techniques above...they only mask the link when being hovered over or what is shown in the status bar, correct?

I apologize if I am asking in the wrong place, just wanted to know if I was correct in my assumption about the suggestions above only hiding the links to the hover and status bar.

If someone could point me in the direction of any information regarding the topic of combating hijacking the links I would appreciate that also.

Thanks for any help ahead of time and I will continue to read through the informative posts here.

ozchris · #13 (**permalink**) 11-11-2007, 08:15 AM

I was looking into this today.

I just lost my two top sites - the domain expiry emails went to an address I didn't think I used anywhere, and someone got lucky and grabbed it.

So I'm rebuilding them and want to get organised this time, in terms of managing my numerous affiliate links.

I know it's pretty easy to do the redirects above, but I had seen something advertised recently, that also included tracking and reporting, and I can't remember the name.

Some I've found today are:

Adtrackz Special Offer - looks pretty fancy
Affiliate Link Redirect and Cloaking Script - Simple Link Manager - looks good as well
Affiliate Link Cloaker - one of the earlier ones
Redirect Magic - havent heard of this guy
Affiliate link protection by LinkShield. URL Cloaking - hmm. membership based and older
Affiliate Link Protector - Reviews and free Affiliate Link Protector downloads at Download.com
Ninja link Cloaker - Advanced Affiliate Link Cloaker - doesnt look like it does reporting

Anyone used any of these or can recommend a nice solution?

i've got around 4 websites that use a variety of say 60 affiliate links, some overlapping, so I'd like to become more organised. finally.

cheers

infinity22 · #14 (**permalink**) 11-13-2007, 01:12 AM

to cloak/hide your affiliate link, the best to use is php. a simple redirect is good for very basic need. with php, you can do more then just redirect, you can code a little bit more to capture the visitors ip, time of the click, etc. you can hire a programmer from site like elance & rentacoder to do the coding job.

javascript is not a good choice since more people are disabling the script especially firefox users using the noscript plugin.

html refresh meta is simple but you need to create htm file for each affiliate link, it's nto easy to manage if you are running many affiliate links on several websites.

my 2 cents.

moneyhome · #15 (**permalink**) 12-02-2007, 10:34 AM

I use Affiliate Profit Guard to keep my affiliate profits safe from commission thieves... It's actually work! www.AffiliateProfitGuard.com

ivenms · #16 (**permalink**) 02-25-2008, 12:28 AM

Check my signature, cutelink... Hope that it will help you to completly hide your link affiliate links completly...

1stgirl.com · #17 (**permalink**) 03-20-2008, 12:36 AM

No offence intended but I have to say that making shorter links, redirections are some of the amateurish techniques to reduce affiliate program robbery.

I'm using a free tool (Cloaker Buzz) to build webpages to promote more than 1,000 digital products (see my signature). SEs love them and I'm getting good traffic and money too. If you click my links you would still see my webpages with the stuffs I'm promoting.

If you click those with redirections and shorter links, you still see the merchants' links and tempted (I did) to cut away the aff portion.

artview · #18 (**permalink**) 03-22-2008, 07:49 AM

What I do when I want to hide an affiliate link is I just use and create a sub domain of my site. Depends on your hosting package but I get unlimited sub domains so I create 1 for each affiliate program. I just redirect the sub domain to my affiliate link. Now if I am using a link on my site, in an email or for posting somewhere I have 1 link I can use everywhere.

1stgirl.com · #19 (**permalink**) 03-23-2008, 02:09 AM

True it is easy to ceate a webpage and "redirect the sub domain to my affiliate link."

The problem is that such webpages (with redirection scripts) wouldn't be indexed by any SEs. If there are
two many such webpages at a particular site, it will probably be banned by the SEs.

suchboy · #20 (**permalink**) 06-29-2008, 03:32 AM

Here are some great web tools to create a cloak affiliate links
Hide Affiliate Links
Even can encrypt them!
As the matter of fact, I don't want to know so much about "techniques".