link cloaking and meta refresh

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megler

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Aug 14, 2006
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I already cloak my affiliate links, but now I'm learning that it's best to also hide the referrer as well. yeah - I'm feeling nooby about just figuring this out.

Question is, if I use a service like cloakedlink.com where it hides the referrer, but also encrypts the link, is it cool to still use my redirect so the link will have a decent name?

ie. cloakedlink names something:
cloakedlink.com/ctrgfcckyg --

can I now use my redirect script do it looks like domain.com/go/tag or does that defeat the purpose?

thanks!
 


Why don't you just upload a simple html page with a meta refresh redirecting to another meta refresh. Double meta refresh is the way to go.
What if that service goes down, then you're fucked.
 
here's the part where I show I have no idea what I'm doing - the html page with the 1st meta refresh - how do I get traffic to it if I do SEO? It makes sense for PPC. Wouldn't that scew up my linking with the SE's?
 
You get traffic to your main site, your regular landing page. Then you have a page on your site that's like discounts.php (or whatever). That page is the one that redirects to the merchant via meta refresh. So the link from your landing page, instead of being a link to the merchant, goes to discounts.php which then goes to the merchant.

If you double meta refresh then you have discounts.php meta refresh to another page on a different site that also meta refreshes. I need coffee so I may have phrased everything I said there really badly, but I hope you get the gist of it. So, basically, you don't get organic traffic direct to your redirect page - you get it to your regular site as normal.
 
I created a cloaking script recently, it uses a javascript submit redirect and has a meta refresh as a backup. The PHP code is there because without it a potential query string (the part of an url after the questionmark) is not included when redirecting.

It's very easy to use, just paste the code in a PHP file and populate these two variables with the right data:

$offer_name = '';
$redirect_url = '';

Code: 
<?php

$offer_name = '';
$redirect_url = '';

//don't edit below this line unless you know what you are doing

$query_string = FALSE;

function make_get_array($keyandvalue) {
  //expects "key=value" string
  $key = strtok($keyandvalue, '=');
  $value = strtok('=');
  global $get_array;
  $get_array[$key] = $value;
}

function input($query_string) {
  if ($query_string) {
    $input = '';
    global $get_array;
    foreach ($get_array as $key => $value) {
      $input .= "<input type='text' name='$key' value='$value'>";
    }
    return '<div style="display:none;">'.$input.'</div>';
  }
}

//check for query string
if (strstr($redirect_url, '?')) {
  $get_array = array();

  //extract query string
  $query_string = strstr($redirect_url, '?');
  $query_string = ltrim($query_string, '?');

  //extract key/value sets if multiple
  if (strstr($query_string, '&')) {
    $keyandvalue = explode('&', $query_string);
    foreach($keyandvalue as $kv) {
      make_get_array($kv);
    }
  } else make_get_array($query_string);
}
?>

<html>
  <head>
    <title><?php echo $offer_name ?></title>
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=<?php echo $redirect_url; ?>">
  </head>
  <body>

    <form name="form1" id="form1" method="get" action="<?php echo $redirect_url; ?>">
    <?php echo input($query_string); ?>
    </form>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        document.form1.submit();
    </script>

    <?php sleep(1); ?>

    <div style="padding: 30px; text-align: center;">
        You are being automatically redirected to <?php echo $offer_name; ?>.<br/><br/>
        Page Stuck? <a href="<?php echo $redirect_url; ?>">Click Here</a>.
    </div>

  </body>
</html>
 
thanks much guys. it all makes sense now. sometimes i'm so smart and sometimes I'm such a dumbass. I thought about Prosper, but since I didn't do PPC I didn't look too hard at it. Maybe I'll look at it again.

Thanks again for the great resources!
 
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