How to cloak your affiliate links

Cloaking affiliate links is a common practice among marketers. I’ll show you the reasons and ways you can do it.

Assuming you are promoting a product sold by somesite.com, you will get an URL in the form of http://somesite.com/?affid=1234. Whenever a visitor goes to that link and purchases the product you will get a certain (financial) benefit. The problem is that if you link directly to such an URL, a lot of your visitors may just remove the ?affid=1234 part. Why? There are many possible reasons… Your visitor may think the incentive you get will be billed to them (which is false) or simply won’t want you to make any money off their purchase.

Affiliate link cloaking is a way you can disguise the remote link in such a way that it no longer looks like an affiliate URL. You would basically point your visitors to http://yoursite.com/productXYZ.html that redirects to the affiliate link. I’ll show you three ways to do it.

The simple HTML redirect

This method was widely used by marketers before the spread of hosting services that allow server-side processing. You simply set up an HTML page for each product you want to promote and place this code inside the <head> tag:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;URL=http://somesite.com/?affid=1234" />

The URL in red is your affiliate link. The only downside of this method is that you will have oodles of HTML pages to manage if you promote lots of products. It is also inconsistent – if you promote various products on the same site that have URL’s like somesite.com/?affid=1234&prodid=5678, &prodid=8901 and so on and your affiliate ID changes you will have lots of pages to edit by hand.

The server-side redirect

Assuming you use PHP on your server, you can set up redirects with a simple line like

<?php header (“Location: http://somesite.com/?affid=1234”); ?>

The advantage over the aforementioned method is that you can build a script that dynamically queries a database and redirects the user to a given site based on a parameter. You can have yoursite.com/?redirect=1 point to somesite.com/?affid=1234 and yoursite.com/?redirect=2 point to othersite.com/?affid=xyzt.

The .htaccess redirect

If you would rather not use PHP or another server-side programming language and want to manage all your redirects unitarily without setting up individual HTML pages for each, you can simply dump all your affiliate links in your .htaccess file like in this example:

Redirect /product1 http://somesite.com/?affid=1234

Redirect /product2 http://someothersite.com/go/xyzt

Redirect /product3 http://thirdsite.com/index.php?promoterID=john

This method may come in handy if your host doesn’t support any server-side programming language (are there still any that don’t?) or if you need a quick way of deploying your links without doing any programming.

'Marketing'