Benefits Of Affiliate Link Cloaking

About a month and a half ago I made an entry named Cleaning Up Affiliate Links. Maybe I should have named it Make Your Own Free Affiliate Link Cloaker.

I don’t even think the practice is termed in the industry this way, but that’s what I called the process because, at the time, I was just focused on making sure my affiliate links were SEO friendly.

So the benefits of cleaning up your affiliate links, or cloaking them, are as follows:

Lifetime Link Authority – The reason why I call it lifetime link authority is because I may write an article on HubPages or for E-Zine ect, add an affiliate link and forget about it for a year or two.

Then one day I may get an e-mail saying that the affiliate program is closed or the linking codes have changed. No panic, I can go to the redirect file hosted on my server, and redirect the link elsewhere, by simply changing the landing target. This is great because I may have placed the link in hundreds of places outside of my website and may not have access to change or update it. This gives me full control over where my links are sending visitors, long after the initial embedding of the link occurred.

I recently received an e-mail from Netfirms Web Hosting saying they switched to a new affiliate platform. Needless to say I have my affiliate link for Netfirms on all my websites and on most of my outside projects. (Like Blogger, Hubpages, Ezine to name a few) So I simply logged into my file manager, updated my “netfirms.html” file with the updated affiliate link, and everywhere that I placed , http://www.info-intel.com/netfirms.html , was instantly updated. That’s important.

Link Security – You got lots of hackers out there that will hack your pages or entries and update your affiliate links in a way that it will give them credit for YOUR sales. By hosting your own blog/website, and redirecting your affiliate links through it, or cleaning them up, gives you security for your links.

Monetary Integrity – Lets face it, some customers will try to make it to the target page in such a way that the referrer isn’t given credit. A good example is simply erasing the referral information from the end of the link.

I may see abc.com/?ref=vizfact , just decide to type in abc.com on my own. I am guilty of this. However, you can’t pull that crap with , info-intel.com/abc.html .

By cloaking your affiliate links, the option simply isn’t there. By the time they land on the target page, you already have credit for the referral, so no problem if they delete your referral code because the hit and the cookie has been set.

Professionalism – Having your links cloaked and redirected with a tad of sexiness also adds to your professionalism. No one really wants to clink on a long drawn out affiliate link, and having it shortened not only helps with professionalism, but also helps with SEO.

SEO – The search engines hate affiliate links because of the types of characters they employ. #, ), &, ?, _ , and so on and so forth. However the search engines do not have a problem with redirects, in fact, the major search engines recommend the use of them, when possible, for affiliate links. Me too, because I can name my affiliate links with keywords.

Grab important advice about the topic of free traffic – please read the site. The time has come when proper information is truly within one click, use this possibility.

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2. 10 Benefits To Starting Your Own Affiliate Business Online
3. Discover These Effective Ways To Start Promoting Your Site Or Affiliate Link!
4. Affiliate Marketing And SEO – Building The Link
5. Learn Affiliate Marketing the Wealthy Affiliate Why