If you want to make income from your internet then you may try affiliate marketing. It is the easiest and cheapest method of earning money online. In this marketing, you will refer someone to any online product and you will get a commission when the person will buy the products based on your reference. This commission can vary from $1 to $10000. It depends on what type of product you are promoting. As many people use this process, this becomes very competitive. It is not a part of mention that the market is filling up with many scammers. Many dishonest companies are related to commission theft. They set up some malware in other’s web browser.
But with affiliate URL cloaking it is easier and simpler to update the URL with just one click. Name cheap affiliate method worked on the principle of ShareASale community. Now all of the marketers who worked in this market are turning towards affiliate URL cloaking.
What Is Link Cloaking?
In the field of SEO, there are some practices that feel some offensive even they are actually valid. The link cloaking is the best way to improve your search rank, save your own website and make things a little neater. Simply you can say that link cloaking is an act of affiliate link which helps to remove the visible affiliate code. You can’t recognize that it is an affiliate link. After completing the link cloaking a redirect is taken into consideration so that the commission of the marketers may be well protected. Most of the affiliate links are lengthy. For this, it is very difficult to remember. Link cloaking is used to shorten this lengthy link and makes a branded and short URL.
The necessity of Affiliate Link Cloaking
There are several reasons why you should cloak your links.
1. Increase Clickthroughs
Affiliate URLs are quite ugly and disagreeable to the eyes. That is the main reason why people run away from the site. By making them branded and beautiful, people will be interested and more inclined to click.
2. Make Your Affiliate Link Management Easier
Affiliate programs close and the links of the products expire from time to time. So it is required to remove or change those affiliate links. Using a simple link cloaking can make this process very easy. You have to change the affiliate link in one place and you can see it be modified everywhere.
3. Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
Cloaked Affiliate links are helpful to point back to your own domain from social media sites. Other blocks and forums. It is very helpful to enhance your search engine ranking on Google.
4. It Can Improve Link Tracking
Most of the link cloaking options offer conversion and click tracking, external pixel tracking, a or b split testing, and ad tracking report. It will help you to determine which pages, posts of blog’s layout drive the highest commission.
5. Avoid Search Ranking Penalties
Mainly Google runs the sites on the basis of popularity. But Google does not consider the affiliate links on the basis of popularity as these links are used for the purpose of making money. For this reason, Google considers the code of rel=nofollow for all of the affiliate links. By using a link cloaking plugin this process becomes very easy. The main advantage is that if you once cloak your affiliate link then you can reuse this link for several times on your blog posts.
6. The process of Cloaking Affiliate Links
The basic process of cloaking an affiliated link is very simple and easy. The steps are as follows-
- At first, you have to create a folder from where you can easily serve your redirects. At Yoast people use /out/.
- After that, you have to block the /out/ folder in your robots.txt file. You can add Disallow: /out/.
- Use a script in your redirect folder for redirecting to your affiliate URLs.
Step 2 assures that search engines will not follow the redirects. You add some external security measure in your script to prevent accidents of your affiliate links.
Some peoples think that using cloaking links is an ambiguous practice. But some think this is a good practice. This is a simple process and you can rely on it. But if you are confused about the using of cloaking links then you can take some safety measures. Only an affiliate marketer knows that how much important it is. If you really want to save your commission in an effective way then using cloaking links is the best practice. This can protect you from several troubles.