3 Reasons Why You Should NOT Use A Free Link Cloaking Service
Quick Note: This post is about link masking. I use the term ‘cloaking‘ throughout this post because this term is more often used when people are, in actuality, discussing link masking. Link masking is hiding your affiliate link from the viewer to prevent your commissions from being stolen or to increase your click-through rates, whereas, link cloaking is a way of trying to manipulate the search engines. You can read what Google say about link cloaking by visiting here.
Anyone who has been involved with affiliate marketing for some time will be aware of affiliate commission hijacking. Commission hijacking is basically anything that results in the affiliate not making commission from making a referral. Some people just don’t like to click on a link if it looks like an affiliate link. As I stated in my previous post 3 Ways To Cloak Affiliate Links. I think this is crazy. One of the solutions for affiliates is to use free link cloaking software or websites. I have three major concerns about such services and here are my reasons why!
1. Your online credibility becomes tied in with your links
If you are intending on building a reputable online business then you should stare clear of any URL cloaking service that you are not sure about. If the service you use ever gets blacklisted for spamming then your reputation will be tied in to this. If you have 100s of affiliate links that you’ve cloaked using such a service then every link will become useless if the site goes down. If you do use a free link cloaking service then use one
that has been around for a while or has been recommended by someone you trust; I recommend TinyURL and BudURL (not strickly URL cloaking services but they have good reputations as URL shortening services that can be used to cloak your affiliate links).
I also want to point out that you may send a customer a link that is cloaked using a free service that a spammer uses to send a similar looking link that takes your customer to a porn site. Your reputation will be closely linked to the URL cloaking service and to the spammer. It just isn’t worth the risk!
2. You do not own the links
That’s right, you do not own your links. Any link that you use and promote may be rendered useless at anytime if the service goes offline for any reason. You may build up a whole catalog of links that are wiped out in a single day. Do you think you can visit every single place that your links reside and change them back to your actual affiliate links? If you are like me then you will have hundreds of links all over the web, you just cannot possibly go through and change all those links, saving your reputation if the worst case scenario happens to you.
3. You cannot be sure your affiliate links will stay yours
Yes, some unscrupulous people that run URL cloaking services may decide that they are not making enough revenue from their efforts and run a process that will change all the affiliate links to point to their affiliate accounts. You may end up unknowingly promoting someone else’s affiliate links instead of your own and lose any commission that you deserve in the process.
So what can you do?
If you need to cloak your affiliate links then your best bet is to cloak them on your own server with a specially designed tool, PowerlinkGenerator. Mike Filsaime owns this product and his reputation stands on it’s effectiveness. If you know anything about Mike Filsaime then you’ll know that his products work. Additional benefits of PowerlinkGenerator is the ability to track click-throughs and store
information such as how often the affiliate program pays-out etc.
Please be sure to take responsibility for your online business and stay away from fly-by-night URL / link cloaking programs that seem too good-to-be-true and take control of your online branding. Remember, a link like this
www.karlmfoxley.com/recommends/PLG
looks better than
www.myfreelinkcloaker.com/PLG.
Even if people do not click on my link they will see the name of my website and may visit at a later date.
To your success,
Karl Foxley
Hi karl!
Thanks for the information.
Regards
–Naresh
Naresh recently posted..4Videosoft DVD to Google Phone Suite
Thanks Karl, for the welcome and the reciprocal visit
I will be sure to add you to my subscriptions.
.-= TheCaymanHost´s amazing last blog ..Install WordPress | BlueHost =-.
I realize this was written some time ago but TinyURL is a poor choice for redirecting links nowadays as some browsers (Chrome for example) automatically show visitors a preview screen revealing the raw link before they ever get to the site. You can thank the spammers who abuse link redirection services for that!
I agree that redirects using your own domain are the way to go – however there are many pitfalls for the unwary and a lot of bad advice out there. One example would be using framed redirects which is one of the worst things you can do because nowadays, browsers such as IE on standard privacy settings, will not allow a cookie to be set from any URL/domain other than that shown in the address bar. Most people don’t know this and are losing commissions hand over fist because of it. I have discussed the alternatives and suggested solutions at length on my own blog if anyone wants more information.
Maurice TCH
.-= The CaymanHost´s amazing last blog ..Free SEO Software Downloads =-.
Yes, I think the post is even older than the date shown on it as it is ported from an older blog.
I prefer BudURL and the like as the stats you get gives you an insight into what links are getting clicked.
I’ll have to check out your website and read your articles. See you over there soon Maurice.
Karl
Karl,..
What about the bitly. I saw some webmasters use it. Is it safe ?
Bit.ly and other services are safe but if you are in anyway looking into affiliate marketing as a business then you need to take ownership of your URLs.
Karl