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The affiliate marketing world is a very competitive place to set up a business. It’s so cut-throat that people are always looking for the next edge and the next bit of technology that will help drive more sales and more commissions. Unfortunately, sometimes that can lead to unsavory tacticsused to steal other’s affiliate commissions.
Commission theft commonly happens via malware loaded unsuspectingly on people’s computers. This malware monitors the pages those people visit, finds affiliate links on those pages, replaces an affiliate’s unique affiliate ID code with their own affiliate ID code, and thereby steals that affiliate’s commissions.
Fortunately for the 99% of legitimate affiliate marketers out there, the industry has an accepted and proven defense: Link Cloaking.
In this article, we’ll talk about actual use-case scenarios for cloaking your affiliate links and show you how ThirstyAffiliates can help you master it.
What is Link Cloaking?
Link cloaking is the process of disguising the affiliate link URL provided by an affiliate program to muddle the affiliate ID and make the link shorter. Link cloaking protects your affiliate commissions by making the affiliate ID less visible. At the same time, it makes the link more visually appealing to visitors.
Here’s an example of a cloaked affiliate link:
So where does this link really go? For this example, we’ve used our Bluehost affiliate link, which then takes users to the Bluehost homepage. This is link cloaking in action.
If a visitor clicks on this link or types it in their browser, everything stays on my site until the last minute when they have transported across to Bluehost’s servers. Thanks to this process, there’s less chance my commissions will be stolen if a visitor were to purchase hosting through my link.
Using a link cloaker like ThirstyAffiliates allows you to protect your commissions from theft and ensure that you get 100% of the reward for your efforts as an affiliate marketer.
How Does Link Cloaking Work?
Cloaking an affiliate link works by sending the visitor via a URL redirection. If you’re not overly technical, that’s okay. You don’t need to know the ins and outs of how link cloaking works to benefit from it. Let’s begin by explaining the overall concept in simple terms.
A URL redirect is basically just a dummy URL that points the visitor’s browser somewhere else. The page itself doesn’t exist on your site, it’s just a placeholder.
Here’s the process your browser goes through with a cloaked link:
- When you click on my cloaked link above, your browser asks our site for the content of the page /recommends/bluehost–wordpress.
- Next, my site responds that the page doesn’t exist, and it tells your browser to go to a different destination to get the content.
- Lastly, your browser reads the response and visits the new URL without any intervention from you
If you’re interested, you might want to understand a little more about the difference between the URL redirect types. To help, we’ve created this short video:
The Benefits Of Link Cloaking
As discussed already, the obvious benefit of cloaking your affiliate links is to protect your commissions. But why else should you use link cloaking?
Link Trust
People are smart. A visitor is much more likely to click a link pointing to the same website they’re on rather than to click on an affiliate link directly. It’s been seen time and time again – cloaking affiliate links leads to an increased click-through rate.
By making the link appear to point to something on your website, you’re increasing the perceived trust in that link.
What would you prefer to click on? A link with a bunch of letters and numbers after it that looks as though the website owner might be getting some sort of sly kick-back for sending you there? Or would you rather click a link that points to another page on the same website you’re on?
Additionally, by cloaking an affiliate link, you can set what the URL looks like. So, instead of a link to a product page on some other site with random numbers and product IDs that make no sense to my audience, you can change the slug of the URL to whatever you’d like.
For example:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/bb2e/ links to a cool Tuan Tuan sleeping bag. But the URL isn’t descriptive at all. You can’t look at that URL and get any idea of what it leads to.
If I cloaked this URL, I could easily present you with
example.com/go/tuan-tuan-sleeping-bag, and you’d know just by looking at the link that it probably leads to a sleeping bag product.
Link cloaking, in turn, leads to more qualified visitors through your affiliate links. Because they know what to expect, they’re more likely to buy.
Management
Next, affiliate link cloaking is usually done with the help of an affiliate link management plugin like ThirstyAffiliates. These sorts of plugins give you many other side benefits, the chief among them being management control.
As an affiliate marketer, you might not just have one or two links. You might have hundreds or even thousands.
The task of organizing and managing more than a few affiliate links over time can become a complete nightmare. That’s why solutions like ours exist.
With ThirstyAffiliates, you can organize your affiliate links into categories to keep them in logical groups. For example, all of your hosting links can belong to a “Hosting” link category. As for your WordPress plugin affiliate links, they can belong to a “WordPress Plugins” link category. And so on.
Additionally, ThirstyAffiliates makes it much easier to insert affiliate links into blog posts.
Simply select some text, search for the link you want to insert, and it’s linked up straight away.
Tracking
Another great benefit of cloaking links is the ability to track the traffic on your affiliate links.
Knowing which affiliate links are actually getting traction with your audience is very important for improving the performance of your links.
For example, with tracking, you might find that your audience likes to click on links about fashion clothing items, but they’re not really clicking links having to do with fashionable technology items. You know, then, to focus more on promoting clothing and writing more content surrounding that topic.
Can You Cloak Affiliate Links Without A Website?
Technically, you can cloak your affiliate links without a website by using services such as bit.ly. However, there are some drawbacks to this.
- You can’t customize the cloaked URL itself, so it’s often just a jumble of letters and numbers (this erodes trust as mentioned above)
- Destination can’t be changed
- You can’t manage your links easily
- It’s not easy to insert the links into your content as you’re writing; you have to go to the service and eyeball them until you find the one you want to copy
- If you lose the login, you lose the history
How to Use ThirstyAffiliates to Cloak Links
Cloaking your link using our tool, ThirstyAffiliates, couldn’t be easier.
First, you’ll need to install the free ThirstyAffiliates plugin, which can be found by searching for “thirstyaffiliates” in your dashboard under Plugins > Add New. Alternatively, you can download it here.
Once installed, you can move on to the fun part.
To Add Your First Affiliate Link:
- Go to ThirstyAffiliates > Add New in your Dashboard
- Set a name
- Set the destination URL (your affiliate link as provided by the affiliate program)
- (Optional) Select a category or add a new category
- Hit the Save Link button
Congratulations, you just set up your first affiliate link in ThirstyAffiliates!
To Insert the Link Into a Post:
To insert a link in a post as you’re writing, simply:
- Select the text you want to link
- Click the TA button in your visual editor (or the Affiliate Link button in the text editor)
- Search for the link by the name that you just inserted
- (Optional) click the Cog icon for a more advanced link picker if you want to browse your links or insert via shortcode/image
So, what happens when you need to change the destination of the link, but you’ve inserted it into several posts? That’s where the real power of ThirstyAffiliates comes in.
To change the destination of a cloaked link, you only need to edit the link in ThirstyAffiliates, not all of the posts you’ve inserted the link into.
Conclusion
For a demonstration of these instructions, be sure to go back and watch the “Introduction to ThirstyAffilaites” video at the top of this post.
You should now have a thorough understanding of what link cloaking is and how to go about using this great affiliate marketing technique. We’ve also covered the benefits of using our ThirstyAffilaites link cloaking feature.
Still have questions on how to cloak the affiliate links on your website? Ask away in the comments section!
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Thank you for this awesome guidance. Affiliate marketing is one of the main sources of income for bloggers like us. This is really a great tool to gain more from affiliate URLs.
My pleasure Deepika, best of luck on the blogging!
Thank you. This is very helpful because I am a complete newbie affiliate marketer. Now my question is answered why a blue word when clicked will land to another page
Thank you for explaining what link cloaking is. You are right, it doesn’t sound as scary or sinister as I had originally thought it would be!
Thanks for the comment Amy 🙂 Glad it helped clear up some myths!
I’m Amazon associated user and i’m running a website for an affiliate, this guide is really helpful for me … now i’m going to install the plugin and also gonna change the Urls which i have placed directly.
Thanks for sharing ..
Does the plugin add a nofollow tag automatically to the affiliate link?
Hi Hansen, yes you can set this in the general settings or per link 🙂
Okay, thanks for clarifying that.
I found this very helpful, thanks!
You’re welcome Kaj 🙂
Hi, If i have a cpa offer i want to promote and i want to cloak the url, do i need a landing page?
Hi Francis,
CPA offers work best when you direct people to a landing page – yes.
If you’re just testing the conversion on the offer though you could send them directly to your cloaked link and get a count of the visits that way.
Hope this helps.
Do we have any risk from Google Analytics, Google considering cloaking as black hat pratice?
I used it on my blog (https://stylistme.com/amp) since a couple of weeks and updates lot of links with your nice plugin (to track best source pages)
Hi,
I want to promote cpa offers using link cloaking and bring paid traffic instead of taking the traffic to landing pages.
Ofcourse there is no guarantee that ppc channels allow this but want to try this.
Does cpa network allow this? and will traffic that we bring to this link cloaking be counted like regular traffic?
Please ping your skypeid if i can reach you there?
Please let me know.
Thank You
Hi Nagesh,
Thats a question for the affiliate network you are working with. From my knowledge they probably won’t say no unless there’s a special non-compete condition on the PPC. This is usually in place when the company themselves are heavy on PPC ads. Give it a go and just talk to your affiliate manager about it, you won’t know the answer unless you ask 🙂
I’m Amazon affiliates user and i’m running a website for an affiliate, this is an awesome guide for me … now i’m going to install this pluginfor sure and also gonna change the Urls which i have placed directly.
Awesome share
Glad you have taken some value from the guide! Thanks for stopping by 🙂
How to make link cloaking for Amazon? thx John
Hey John,
Check out our post all about that topic here:
https://thirstyaffiliates.com/optimizing-results/why-and-how-you-should-uncloak-your-amazon-affiliate-links
I am using the thirstyaffiliate-Plugin since yesterday and i am excited, how the users will react to the new cloaking urls.
Welcome aboard Marvin!
Thank for sharing this informative blog post about the affiliate marketing and link cloaking 101 with thirsty affiliate link management plugin for WordPress. The plugin is useful for affiliate marketers indeed.
Hi and thanks for that video. Can your tool solve the Safari issue (blocking 3rd party cookies)? Is Link Cloaking still possible for Mac users? Thanks.
Hi Cvetan,
I’m on mac and have no worries at all.
will the recipient of the link still be able to see that the link comes from my website?
Hi Erik,
Yes, when you cloak a link what you are doing is basically creating a redirect. The visitor visits your cloaked URL, then they are immediately redirected to the destination URL which includes your tracking information. The destination URL is the URL that the affiliate program you’re working with provides you.
Hope this helps!
Thanks a lot for the information!
So far I’ve been using Scarlett cloaker to cloak my links and has been working great for me but I will try the ThirstyAffiliates plugin to see if its better 🙂
Thanks in advance for giving us a go Victor 🙂
These links look more appealing. I’m going to try ThirstyAffiliates plugin.
Finally, my all questions related to cloaking resolved here.
Thanks
Thanks for the useful info, Josh.
Are there any concerns with cloaking an affiliate link that will redirect again? For example, would any issues arise if your cloaking link were to redirect to a Google click tracker that then redirects again to the final landing page?
Also in this scenario, if we were to use the uncloaking feature on a link like this, would the user still pass through the google click tracker in order to get all of the click tracking in that tracking system as well?
Side effect, your plugin shutdown my bounce race 😉 I hope google doesn’t see a black hat pratice!
How to cloak using cpanel? Can you help?
Install ThirstyAffiliates wordpress plugin Ivy, don’t need to do anything in cpanel
I have installed the plugin and activated it. I have included my affiliate links, but when I click on them, they still show the ugly affiliate link. What could be the problem?
Post-redirect it’s up to the affiliate program to handle any further redirections. If they don’t do this, then there’s not much you can do. ThirstyAffiliates will put the link behind a redirect to give a friendly looking URL, but that is as far as you can go. Any “cloaking” beyond that is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Hi,
Is there any way to mask the url appeared in the url address bar at the top of the directed site?
I mean, for example, your https://thirstyaffiliates.com/recommends/bluehost-wordpress link will be appeared as https://www.bluehost.com/wordpress?utm_source=%28direct%29&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=affiliate-link_codemyow_notype
at the top of the bluehost page, which let the users realize that the link they clicked was actually an affiliate link. So, what I’m looking for is some method to show https://www.bluehost.com/ as Bluehost original home page url rather than https://www.bluehost.com/wordpress?utm_source=%28direct%29&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=affiliate-link_codemyow_notype . Am I searching an impossible technique?
Jack
By the time they’ve clicked it, it’s already marked you as the affiliate for their sale. Going this one step further is possible with some javascript or by iframing the page but its not recommended as this level of cloaking is against Google’s webmaster guidelines. You’ll be deindexed pretty quickly if you pursue it.
Hi Josh,
Thanks for the article, how does a tracker fit into this picture?
For example if I’m using Bemob or Voluum, at what stage do I put the tracking link in?
Hey Greg, as you’re wanting to link up a word in your site. You would instead create a new link in ThirstyAffiliates, it gives you a cloaked url and then you use that instead.
Hi Josh,
I have a little bit of confusion about the “noindex” tag.
Should I use “noindex” tag in my cloaked url?
or is it perfect with only “nofollow” and without “noindex” tag?
Please help me for the same. I waiting for your response.
Thanks!
I suggest both, follow these guidelines:
https://thirstyaffiliates.com/knowledgebase/how-to-prevent-affiliate-links-from-getting-indexed-in-search-engines
Thanks Josh!
Hi Josh,
Thanks for explaining what link cloaking is.
Maybe i gonna start with a single site license within a few days.
Cheers and stay safe!
Michel
Hi. Isnt link cloaking against amazon guidelines.?!
Hi John,
Yes, you’re correct. ThirstyAffiliates has an uncloaking feature specifically designed to deal with this problem. This blog post gives an overview of the feature and how to use it: https://thirstyaffiliates.com/optimizing-results/why-and-how-you-should-uncloak-your-amazon-affiliate-links
Thanks!
can we use brand new domains for Link Cloaker or should we use aged domains?
Hi Alex,
It shouldn’t matter whether the domain is new or old. Thanks!
Syble
Hello, I’ve got a website on HTTPS, but an affiliate network I’d like to use, has all affiliate codes on HTTP. So when I put those links on my site, the “Not Secure” warning displays on the browsers.
Will cloaking these HTTP affiliate links, eliminate that from happening? (The not secure warnings).
Thanks!
Hi Greg, yes it should stop those warnings on your affiliate links for that http network.
Hello,
Can i use Thirsty Affiliate Plugin for Amazon Associates for free?
Please let me know, as i am new in affiliate marketing industry.
Thanks
This is great. I will definitely try link cloaking
Wow This is amazing very useful information i was exactly looking for that i will definitely try link cloaking now thanks.
I am using the thirstyaffiliate-Plugin since yesterday and i am excited,
Josh, thanks for this awesome tool. The affiliate links really look elegant now. It is easy to use too. I am pretty excited to use. Can I share these links on other platforms like twitter and Facebook. Sorry if I sound foolish. I am pretty new to affiliate marketing. Am learning all the time.
Hi TA!
How do I implement my affiliate link as I am from CB. So all my blog post are offers from them. Where will I place my affiliate link?
Is it to the “add new” or “destination url”
TIA
Do you have to cloak your affiliate links if you use the shortened amazon Link?
I am very glad to find your blog very helpful.
Really nice and useful info. Plus, I think the style and design of your site is great.
Hello TA thanks for sharing this Link cloaking article it’s Very useful information… Keep up the good work
Great post on link clocking… Keep Sharing…
After your writings, I became inspired .Thank you
I really appreciate the kind of topics you post here. Thanks for sharing us a piece of great information that is actually helpful. Good day
Thank you for explaining What is Link Cloaking. Looking forward to more Blogs from you. Keep Sharing Always.
Hi, first I thought it a click bait but I never though that clocking can provide this much benefits. I am learning digital marketing and this topic really amaze me. Thank you.
NICE article bro
will try Thirsty Affiliates plugin. Really appreciate your blog.
Will it really
Super article bro
Very Nice Article I love it!
Hi Josh,
Links from ShareAsale or CJ are pretty lengthy and ugly, So I would like to cloak them but can someone steal my commission when I use affiliate links from FirstPromoter, because they let you customize and there is no such number or letters in the links, I can use my name as Id, So, is it still unsafe If I don’t cloak the Firstpromoter links?
nice one
I am very glad to find your blog very helpful.
Thanks Josh!
amazing post thanks for sharing
Very Nice Article I love it!
Love this stuff !
thanks for sharing this stuff, I was really looking for this type of stuff.
great work keep it up and keep sharing informational stuff like that
I first learnt about this word and searched it and went through you blog and i got all the information i needed for this topic thank you very much and much appreciate the effort.
Great one thanks for sharing
Amazing article . i am impressed !!
Thank you very much for sharing this informative article it was very helpful and something new to learn….
Keep Sharing…..will wait for your upcoming articles
Such a great informative post sir, keep it up.
Very Informative post. So nice of you. Thank you sir
Thank you for this help, keep share with us.
Your article is awesome , thank u for sharing
I’m interested in getting into affiliate marketing but still doing research into pros and cons, and what I need to do. Thanks for the info in your blog on link cloaking.
I have one question. Is thirstyaffiliates only for use in WordPress? Or is it compatible with Squaresquare created websites? Many thanks.
This is really a nice and informative, containing all information and also has a great topic.
Thanks for this article. It’s really well written.
Hey,
Thank you for sharing this informative article. It was very helpful and something new to learn in future i will surely applied this informative article.
This is really a nice and informative, containing all information and also has a great topic.
nice blog thanks for sharing
Thank you for this plugin sir, it will save my lots of time.
Interesting information. Thanks for the share
fantastic blog thanks for the share
Amazing blog thanks for your input
All this information to stay on top of the game! I had never heard of cloaking since I just started posting affiliate links. Thank you for the video showing us visually what to look for , as well as, all the step by step instructions. I appreciate you teaching us your little gems of information. It’s a win – win for everyone! Shalom
Love the blogs. Been enjoying the content a lot!
Hello, and thank so much for the helpful info. I just started a new affiliate project, and was wondering how people make their affiliate links look nicer. I think they were using your plugin. I like that is makes that the affiliate link is a part of your website. I think that would get more clicks and help viewer to actually click the link. Very nice that it’s for WordPress. Thank again!
I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this