Affiliate Marketing

Hide Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on April 9, 2009

hide-affiliate-link

Image Source: sxc.hu

As affiliate marketers, we may need to hide and redirect our affiliate URLs. This post discusses various ways to hide affiliate links and then zooms in on how to use the WordPress Redirection plugin to hide and redirect affiliate links.

As for terminology, people call it link cloaking, link masking or link redirection (see Shoemoney’s post for semantics) but to make it simple, I’ll refer to it as hiding affiliate links.

Many Ways To Skin A Cat Or Hide Affiliate Links

  1. Link Shortening Services: Create a short URL with a click of a button using services like TinyURL or abbrr. Most of these services do not provide a way to save the list of URLs you have shortened so my recommendation is to create a simple spreadsheet to track all shortened affiliate links.
  2. Professional Scripts: Buy paid scripts like Affiliate Redirector or Samurai Stealth Cloaker to hide affiliate links. By the way, I have hidden these affiliate links with the WordPress Redirection plugin.
  3. Write Your Own Scripts: This is a little too technical for the layperson and I guess you wouldn’t be reading this post if you could write your own script. But if you really want to write your own script then Shoemoney’s post provides a good primer.

Cloaking Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

Obviously, there are many ways to hide affiliate links but I like using the WordPress Redirection Plugin because of its simplicity and basic tracking features.

  1. Download, install and activate the WordPress Redirection Plugin
  2. From your WordPress administrator dashboard, click “Tools” followed by the “Redirection” option on the left panel.
  3. In the “Source URL” textbox add your masked URL. This page doesn’t have to be a valid page, for example, I added http://www.kuzzuk.net/go/AffiliateRedirector which does not exist in reality. In the “Target URL”, add your affiliate link and leave the other options as default. Click the “Add Redirection” button to save the changes.
    redirect-hide-affiliate-links
  4. Now place this masked URL in any of your blog posts and the reader will be directed accordingly. I normally do one more step when I’m linking using masked URLs, I add the rel=”nofollow” tag which means that search engines do not follow this link while indexing my site. This is an often ignored but important step.

Questions or comments. Please feel free to ask!

Comments

5 Comments
  1. Odessa

    “Now place this masked URL in any of your blog posts and the reader will be directed accordingly. I normally do one more step when I’m linking using masked URLs, I add the rel=”nofollow” tag which means that search engines do not follow this link while indexing my site. This is an often ignored but important step.”

    This is acutally not correct. “nofollow” attribute doesn’t mean, search engine don’t follow it, it only means, the link won’t be taken into account for link popularity.

    If you indeed want to prevent that page form being indexed, you have to either set a “noindex” robots meta tag (won’t work if you’re redirecting via header(”Location: …”); function of PHP) or to include that file or folder in the robots.txt and prevent it from being indexed.

    Next time better to your SEO homework first ;)

    Comment by Odessa on April 11, 2009 at 5:29 pm

  2. Kuzzuk

    Odessa > Thanks for your comment. What the nofollow does is still vague so for the sake of simplicity, I put in that search engines do not follow the page. You are absolutely right in saying that the robots meta tag set to “noindex” is more appropriate. Usually, I use a plugin to do that but I’ve not installed it yet on this blog. Thanks for your feedback!

    Comment by Kuzzuk on April 12, 2009 at 1:11 am

  3. Bill Stilwell

    Kuzzuk: As an affiliate, do you know if there is a way to track who has purchased a product or service using a link on the affiliates website?

    Comment by Bill Stilwell on October 9, 2009 at 11:44 am

  4. Kuzzuk

    Bill > If you are using ClickBank (which I do) then their analytics is quite advanced now which includes a tracking code. I usually have different tracking codes so I can monitor the source of the purchase. After that ClickBank gives you the details of the buyer. Normally, I’ll send the buyer a surprise gift :)

    Comment by Kuzzuk on October 10, 2009 at 1:15 am

  5. Harsh Agrawal

    Kuzzuk more easier way to hide affiliate link will be Gocodes wordpress plugin. Give it a try and you will thank me later :)

    Comment by Harsh Agrawal on October 13, 2009 at 8:03 pm