Fine since Matt started this whole thing on hiding links and how people do it in really silly ways like putting nonsense in the onMouseOver WindowStatus I thought why not have a little fun and throw out a nice tip on how to mask your affiliate links.
Hypothetically speaking let’s say you’ve got a thin affiliate site, and you’re of the opinion having all affiliate links out is a “bad quality” indicator, or maybe you want to redirect your links for tracking, or maybe you even buy into the whole “no follow” advertising BS. Here’s one way to do it:
http://example.com/linkout.php?url=amazon.com
You write your script on linkout.php to scan for the URL parameter and redirect accordingly via Javascript. Now lets look at this link
http://example.com/linkout.php?url=amazon.com&p=12345
Now you update your script that so when it detects the “p” parameter instead of redirecting to amazon.com as a straight link it grabs the affiliate link in your database for ID 12345 and redirects accordingly. Regular people will think it’s a straight link and not an affiliate link. Now let’s get even more crafty
http://example.com/linkout.php?url=amazon.com&p=a12345
http://example.com/linkout.php?url=amazon.com&p=b12345
Lets make our script even smarter if the “P” parameter starts with an “A” we go and get the affiliate link from the database, if it starts with a “B” it’s just a dummy value and we use the URL value anyway. With the goal of being a responsible programmer I’d say you should use the “url” parameter as the default value and overwrite accordingly, but I digress. Want to get even more crafty how about this
http://example.com/linkout.php?url=amazon.com&p=c12345
When there is an “A” or “B” in the “P” parameter we redirect via Javascript and be sure to include the Noindex, NoFollow meta tags. However but when there is a “C” in the “P” parameter we redirect via a 301 instead of javascript. You could even be a little more clever and only do the 301 if you know it’s a search engine bot.
Lastly as a responsible programmer I should also warn you about not leaving yourself open to abuse. You should check for a referrer, and strip it down to the base domain, if it’s not you take whatever action you deem appropriate. Sure the examples given here might be pretty easy to spot, but they were also highly examplified. You could totally wonk things up adding random numbers or unix time values in for the dummy values, which would really make things harder to reverse engineer. You could also put the actual landing page URL instead of the simplified version I did here just to make things look that little bit more legit to pesky humans. There are few other things you can do, but I have to keep a few things dark and mysterious.
Related posts:
- How to Mask Affiliate Links How to mask affiliate links is one of the most...
- Cloaking Affiliate Links, How and Why Today’s topic is one that gets asked about pretty regularly,...
- Can Google Detect an Affiliate Website One of the questions that often comes up is does...
- Is This the 11th Hour for Thin Affiliate Sites While some people realized affiliate marketing has has slowly been...
- The Affiliate Marketing Newbie’s Guide To Finding Niches When I started out in internet marketing, I browsed around...
Advertisers:
- Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
- BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
- Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
- Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
- Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
- LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
- TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
- Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
- Link Building Services - Hire WeBuildLink.com for well-planned advanced link building campaigns. Very affordable. Contact us now for a FREE evaluation.
- Join 500+ top agencies & publishers who rely on The HOTH every day. US based, enterprise-grade support. High quality, contextually relevant links. 100% money back guarantee. Try it now.
- Professional website designs - Get a unique brand image with website designs that sets you apart and convert your visitors into customers. Make a brand, not just a website
See my disclaimer about advertising and affiliate links
