affiliate cloaking - more ideas needed

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ianternet

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Sep 11, 2006
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www.ianfernando.com
what is a good way to cloak your affiliate links? besides "on mouse over" or the meta refresh...I am looking for something like a javascript that will just change the link information in the browser taskbar...I want a universal one for every link not just 1 or 2 every link on my page to be just lets say "click Here"

or

another one I had in mind is to create something similar to the meta refresh but in a frame...so lets say u click on one of my affiliates which will either open a new window or redirect you in the same window. what if, since u are leaving the page, split the window into a frame the top which will be small will just have ur banner and some links to link back to ur site, so the users are still on your site, but are also viewing the affiliates site.

if you have ever used traffic swarm it is similar to that where traffic swarm search is at the top and the person site is on the bottom, having hte bigger window. is this possible with a script? if so please let me know

thanks
 


but that redirects to another hyper link - I have so many links in my site that are affiliates and I would not want to do it for every single one - I was hoping for a universal script resolution where maybe it hovers over a link that it changes the taskbar info in any browser or something that requires very little work

lets say I have 100 affiliate links I have to create 100 extra pages with the affiliate link - also there is a new adsense type ad I have on my site which shows the ID and all the coding - so I wont be able to create a php page or htm page for a redirect

thanks for ur idea php redirect is my first of hearing
 
.htaccess redirects in my opinion are the way to go.
create an .htaccess file and enter the following in it
Code: 
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
the first is the url which you want to redirect from, i don't even bother using an .html file, just use a directory and it looks 'cleaner' second url is where you put the url you want to redirect to in. probably not what your looking for, i'm not sure though.
 
A simple PHP header() does it, the redirect is instant and clean plus the link is on a page inside your site as the user sees it, looks much better.
 
Here is the fastest, best way I know of for NEW links you set up form now on and ones you already have that you want to test and measure. This script not only cloaks, but orgranizes your links, does split testing and shows graphs of how all you links are performing. So EVEN if your links are from different networks you can see which ones are getting the best clickthrough and stuff.

But for just link cloaking its awesome. I use it for my other ad tracking and just to shorten links too.

Here's an example. I'm giving away Affiliate Summit tickets and wanted to add the contest to my sig over at Digital Point.

The link to my blog was too long to fit at DP.
affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2006/10/08/5-star-affiliate-summit-contest/

So all I had to do was go into the link cloaking admin panel. Add the word summit and paste the long link above. Thats it. Done!

Now http://www.5staraffiliateprograms.com/summit goes to that long link.
Works the same for affiliate programs. Here's all the info.

Cloak, Organize & Track Affiliate Links EASY - GoTryTHIS
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2006/07/26/affiliate-link-organizer-cloaking/

Hope this helps!
 
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lazar said:
.htaccess redirects in my opinion are the way to go.
create an .htaccess file and enter the following in it
Code: 
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
the first is the url which you want to redirect from, i don't even bother using an .html file, just use a directory and it looks 'cleaner' second url is where you put the url you want to redirect to in. probably not what your looking for, i'm not sure though.
Click to expand...


yeah thats the way I use as well.

easy and simple :)
 
I use the HTaccess - but what about the internet bar it shows the link and affiliate information - such as the clickbank hoplink - anyway around that? I have seen some things such as auper affiliate link manager and redirect magic - anyone uses these?
 
anyone having tracking problems using the php redirect to cloak affiliate links? I was using a php file to do a 301 redirect for an azoogle link and it wasnt tracking right. Only about 1/3 of the clicks i got were tracked by azoogle
 
I have a freebie site with hundreds of affiliate offers too. The way I manage them all is by placing them in a Mysql database and having my redirect page pull the appropriate affiliate link:

Public sees: www.mysite.com/freebie-12.php

.htaccess changes this to: /freebie.php?ID=12

freebie.php pulls affiliate link for ID 12 and redirects using header() function

Once you get them in a database it's all automated from there. I do have a script on the redirect page to prevent google and other bots from indexing. The bot just sees an empty page. I also put a link condom on the original link that the public sees (rel=nofollow).
 
ianternet said:
I use the HTaccess - but what about the internet bar it shows the link and affiliate information - such as the clickbank hoplink - anyway around that? I have seen some things such as auper affiliate link manager and redirect magic - anyone uses these?
Click to expand...

you could have the offer load in an iframe. that would hide everything, unless they are looking for it with livehttpheaders or something.
 
I think that using mod_rewrite in .htaccess is not a good idea, nor a simple 301 redirect. Because google could surely follow these links, correct?

I have this PHP script which redirects in a manner that google should not be able to follow. It shows one page to the search engine crawlers while redirecting to the aff link for everyone else. Here it is:

<?
function check_search_engine() {
if ($a == 1) {
header("Location: http://afflink1");
exit;
}
IF(!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
{
$user_agent = '';
}
ELSE
{
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
}

$search_engines[] = 'Fast';
$search_engines[] = 'Slurp';
$search_engines[] = 'Ink';
$search_engines[] = 'Atomz';
$search_engines[] = 'Scooter';
$search_engines[] = 'Crawler';
$search_engines[] = 'bot';
$search_engines[] = 'Genius';
$search_engines[] = 'AbachoBOT';
$search_engines[] = 'AESOP_com_SpiderMan';
$search_engines[] = 'ia_archiver';
$search_engines[] = 'Googlebot';
$search_engines[] = 'UltraSeek';
$search_engines[] = 'Google';

foreach ($search_engines as $key => $value)
{
IF($user_agent != '')
{
if(strstr($user_agent, $value))
{
$is_search_engine = 1;
}
}
}

IF(isset($is_search_engine))
{
return TRUE;
}
else
{
return FALSE;
}
}
?>
<?
if (check_search_engine() == TRUE) {
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>
<?
} else {
$a = $_REQUEST['a'];
if ($a == 1) {
header("Location: http://afflink1");
exit;
}
}
?>

And then you can just add all of your aff links to the end. You can call this script like so: http://domain.com.../info.php?=a

Using this method, I do not think you have to dissallow bots in your robots.txt file like you would have to with other methods. The upside to this is that the search engine bots don't always check the robots.txt file, and with this script that is a non issue.

Hope this helps, someone correct me if any of this is misinformation.
 
I use a php script. Save this as "info.php." Then you call like so: "http://domainname.com/.../info.php?=a"

This way you don't have to worry about google simply following your 301 redirect. Which I would think they most certainly can.


<?
function check_search_engine() {
if ($a == 1) {
header("Location: afflink1");
exit;
}
IF(!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
{
$user_agent = '';
}
ELSE
{
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
}

$search_engines[] = 'Fast';
$search_engines[] = 'Slurp';
$search_engines[] = 'Ink';
$search_engines[] = 'Atomz';
$search_engines[] = 'Scooter';
$search_engines[] = 'Crawler';
$search_engines[] = 'bot';
$search_engines[] = 'Genius';
$search_engines[] = 'AbachoBOT';
$search_engines[] = 'AESOP_com_SpiderMan';
$search_engines[] = 'ia_archiver';
$search_engines[] = 'Googlebot';
$search_engines[] = 'UltraSeek';
$search_engines[] = 'Google';

foreach ($search_engines as $key => $value)
{
IF($user_agent != '')
{
if(strstr($user_agent, $value))
{
$is_search_engine = 1;
}
}
}

IF(isset($is_search_engine))
{
return TRUE;
}
else
{
return FALSE;
}
}
?>
<?
if (check_search_engine() == TRUE) {
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>
<?
} else {
$a = $_REQUEST['a'];
if ($a == 1) {
header("Location: afflink1");
exit;
}
}
?>
 
edit : just add in you other aff links to the end, in the same manner that the "a=1" is.

edit: you call upon the script like this rather : ...info.php?a=1
 
.htaccess is the way to go. Its simple and very easy to manage. Dont mess around with java script as its not "real." With .htaccess you can type in the address and it will still redirect to whatever you assign to the value. Once they click on your link the cookie is loaded with your tracking info so I wouldn't worry about anyone seeing your aff name.
 
cool I will just do an htaccess - is there a simple script that can manage this? besides the standard open htaccess and reuploading it via ftp - I also would like to see stats per click if possible as well (if possible)
 
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