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Hide Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

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

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.
   
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!