Affiliate Link Masking With A Free WordPress Plugin
Link masking is a great way to protect your affiliate commissions from being hijacked. In today’s post I want to share with you a really cool WordPress Plugin that will allow you to mask your links in no time at all, and right within your WordPress admin area.
Before we get to the good stuff I just want to quickly say that masking your links is what is often referred to as cloaking but they are two different things. Masking is preventing people from viewing your affiliate link to help decrease affiliate link hijacking and to also increase click-through rates, some people really don’t like to click on those affiliate links.
Cloaking your links is a way of gaming the search engines by presenting the search robots with one page while showing people a different page. You can read more about link cloacking and what Google have to say by reading this article.
You’ll want to head on over and grab the GoCodes Redirection WordPress plugin. Then use your FTP client to upload the plugin to your plugins directory and then return to your admin area to activate GoCodes.
To mask your first link you will need to click on the GoCodes link under tools (in your admin area).
Now you’ll want to decide on the name of the redirection.
1. Your custom redirect will be www.yourdomain.com/go/. By choosing your redirection key, in this case, Keyword Elite, my masked link is now
http://www.foxleymarketingsolutions.com/go/KeywordElite.
2. Now you will need input the URL you are masking. In this example I am using a ClickBank affiliate link for a product by Brad Callen called Keyword Elite. If keyword research is your thing then this a serious piece of software. You can also grab a free keyword research report by visiting here.
3. Lastly you will want to select whether or not you want GoCodes to track your clicks, I enable this for a quick reference point.
Now click the ‘Add Redirect‘ button to create your first masked link.
That’s it, you’ve created your first redirect and masked your link. If you would like to change the redirection folder from /go/ to something that you would prefer then you will need to click on the GoCodes button under the ‘settings‘ tab in your WordPress Admin area.
The most common file name people use is ‘recommends‘ but you can use whatever word you like.
GoCodes is a great plugin and I have had no issues since I started using it. The guys who created the plugin do mention one known issue:
There seems to be a conflict with the WP Super Cache plugin where a redirect will only work once before the cache is cleared. There is a workaround, though. All you have to do is add “index.php” on a new line in the “Rejected URLs” field of the WP Super Cache options page. This will disable cacheing of the page yourdomain.com/index.php. Generally, this shouldn’t be too big of an issue, as visitors will rarely add the /index.php when they visit your blog.
As you can see, this work around makes the problem a very minor issue. What are you waiting for, go and check out GoCodes now!
To your success,
Karl Foxley
P.s. Be sure to check out Keyword Elite version 2.0 and put your keyword research on steroids.
P.p.s. An alternative plugin to GoCodes Redirect is Affiliate Mask, I haven’t used this one myself so you will have to test it for yourself. 
Link Masking Software: PHP Link Cloaker, Powerlink Generator, Easy Link Manager
photo credit: Gret@Lorenz
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10 Comments
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- PhilBellamyInc - Link Masking (NOT Cloaking) With A Free Wordpress Plugin - http://bit.ly/29xLs
Eric (1)
The whole use of the word “recommends” in the path to a link redirect has always puzzled me in the sense that adding the word to a cloaked link says “I am an affiliate link”, and one of the points of cloaking is, at least for many people, to disguise the fact from those oddly warped folks who don’t want you to get paid, even if the price they pay remains unaltered regardless. (aside from buying through their own CB account of course
)
I personally don’t care if savvy people recognize a cloaked affiliate link for what it is and decide to get around it. Certainly on my own sites my affiliate activity is clearly stated in my disclaimer, so it seems daft to effectively add another disclaimer in the link itself by screaming “recommends” It’s one of those things that some marketer came up with way back when and has never gone away.
If you’re marketing to a marketing crowd, my recommendation would be to drop the whole “recommends” charade. Just my 2 cents.
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Hey Maurice, thanks for leaving some very good comments here.
I used recommends as an example and, although I still have some very old links still in that format that I haven’t changed yet, I pretty much use GoCodes and the /go/ folder it creates.
I’ve found ‘recommends’ and similar do very well out of the Internet marketing and make money realm.
A pleasure to have you here Maurice,
Karl
Have you compared this to anything like the ninja affiliate plugin?
The Ninja Affiliate plugin has more features but it does come with a price tag.
So in comparison would you say the freebie is “just as good” considering it’s a freebie?
I’ve used it for quite a while now and I have had no problems with it. I use it to track certain internal links as well (from time-to-time) using the built in click-tracking so I would say yes; sometimes you just can’t beat free.
Karl;
Does the URL that gets generated with this plugin have anything to do with your categories on your blog?
For example, when you hover over your keywordelite link above, it displays
http://www.fmsseo.com/go/elite
Which looks a lot like the WordPress permalink structure that includes a category name.
I”m not even sure if any of that matters, I just want to make sure that if I get that plugin, the only thing I have to do is give the location of the URL an appropriate name (like go or recommends). In other words, I don’t have to create a category called GO or Recommends, right?
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Hey Don,
‘Does the URL that gets generated with this plugin have anything to do with your categories on your blog?’… no, ‘go’ is the holding place for the redirects (cloaked URLs).
The link you see was a misconfiguration. I’ve updated the link to what it should be. Thanks for spotting that, still some minor issues left over from our recent move from our old domain.
Karl
So I guess the “elite” part is your nickname for the actual product, right?
I think I’ve got it now! Thanks Karl!
- Don
donpower´s amazing last blog ..What a Blogger Can Learn From a Drowning Man [VIDEO - click post title or image]
Yes, we also do it for internal / external links that we want to track or links that we use outside of our site (to track effectiveness).
Karl