Cloaking Links

I have a couple of affiliate sites that have tons of links. For a while, I’ve neglected cloaking them because I was rearranging them, rebuilding them, was busy with other things, and didn’t know of a really good method to cloak them. A lot of methods require you create a link, then change the old link to that one. With hundreds of links, I didn’t feel like doing that.

I’ve opted for an insanely simple system - create subdomains on my site for each affiliate server. Redirect each one to a different affiliate server. I.E. "http://www.shareasale.com/" and CJ’s stranger ones like "http://www.anrdoezrs.net/" (be sure to include the trailing slash if you ever use this method).

Then I just had to search and replace every instance of, say, "www.shareasale.com" with "mySASsubdomain.mysite.com". Do the same for the rest of the rest of the affiliate servers you use. This should work with pretty much any system. With CJ, don’t forget to include the server for their little 1 pixel image deal: www.lduhtrp.net.

It doesn’t enable you to check your outbound clicks like some paid scripts do, but it is blissfully simple.

And if you want to effectively no-follow those links, there’s a very simple way to do that: disallow each of those subdomains in your .htaccess file. It won’t stop cookie tracking, but it will keep out the bots. Now all your affiliate links are internal to your site, but leading to domains the bots won’t explore. Which puts you neatly in compliance with Google’s paid link stance.