Discussions

How To Hide Affiliate Links

Posted by weblogian • 6/03/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: hide affiliate links, masking

Do you prefer hiding your affiliate links?

Many bloggers think it’s good to hide the affiliate links, not because they don’t want their visitors to know they are affiliated but because of other reasons like:

* Changing your affiliate links is a lot less work because you have to change in just one place then on hundreds of pages where you use those links

* It hides the ugly part of affiliate codes. People tend to not trust long links with a lot of characters and unknown codes. A nicely formated and clean link is more likely to be clicked then one that contains an affiliate code in it.

* It kind of forces them to click the link instead of just typing the link (without your affiliate code ) in the browser.

* better SEO, the links don’t look like affiliate links, the redirect is done from a html page that has noindex on it so search engines shouldn’t look at it.

My Method to hide affiliate links:
weblogian.blogcastor.com/how-to-hide-affiliate-links/

User Comments

6/03/09

timethief

Would you consider this advice and the instructions
to be in the category of "whitehat SEO" or not?

[reply]
1. 6/03/09
  
  weblogian
  
  TT this is no way a black SEO. It solely depend upon the salesman.
  
  Example:
  I am writing a post on my affiliate partners and hiding the long text or code is no Black SEO.
2. 6/03/09
  
  Xight
  
  Its still a white hat method.
  
  SEO? Not really. Affiliate links should be 'no followed' in the link going out to maintain page rank, and not depend on the redirects being no follow/no index. Bots will still follow the link if both the source/destination links have already exist in their db. Its more code optimization than seo.
3. 6/03/09
  
  weblogian
  
  @Xight
  You are right about the pagrank.
6/03/09

legendarytoby

To be honest, I don't know how you get affiliates. LOL

[reply]
1. 6/03/09
  
  weblogian
  
  Go to the site and sign up.
6/03/09

Dealhippie

If you use wordpress, there's an awesome plugin that gives you the ability to create clean, simple URLs on your website that redirect to any other URL. It's called pretty links and it will shrink, track and share any URL from your WordPress website and create shortlinks coming from your own domain. It tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Don't know how I lived without it... wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link/

[reply]
1. 6/05/09
  
  weblogian
  
  That is a great plugin
6/05/09

cooper

Isn't it a little deceptive to hide things? I mean unethical and all?

[reply]
1. 6/05/09
  
  weblogian
  
  Than let's say "change the Url"
  
  One thing people does not like/trust long URLs with unreadable permalinks.
  
  It also depends upon the blogger
  
  My url for my linkworth reads www.blogcastor.com/join-linkworth
  
  This help the Search Engine too
6/05/09

roentarre

Good post and I will try some of the tips

[reply]
1. 6/05/09
  
  weblogian
  
  Thank u dude