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