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Masking affiliate links and how I did it!
One thing I never thought of when building my first affiliate site was that is was a good idea to “mask affiliate links“. My first response to John Chow when he told me last me last week that I needed to do that was “What the heck is that” and “why do I need to do that”
Well there was 2 reasons why I needed to mask my links and this is why!
1- For SEO – I needed to mask my affiliate links because Google and other search engines don’t like sites that are plastered with affiliate links. They like the whole “quality aspect” of websites, even if your site with all the links is a quality site, they don’t want to know the links are there.
2 – Increase click through’s – Most webmasters can tell what an affiliate link looks like and guess what, a lot of regular surfers can tell now a days too. Masking the link to make it look like a page in your site instead of an affiliate link increases your click through’s and makes you more money.
So after understanding why I needed to do this I was faced with a small problem of figuring out yet another thing I needed to do that I had no clue about. I quickly did some research online to find a way to mask over 100 links that was not going to take me days and days of time to do. Well I found a method and all I needed to do was find my .htaccess file for my site and add a line of code to it for each link. That is where a problem showed up that took me over 2 days to solve.
As it turned out my .htaccess file was hidden in my file manager. Meaning I could not see it! What I had to do was in my Legacy File Manager (a part of cpanel) was enable hidden files to be seen. Once this was done it was only a matter of time before I had all my links masked and looking like pages in my site. Oddly enough once I found that stupid file I was able to change all my links (which I will show you how to do in a second) in a matter of a few hours.
*Note*
If you are unsure of playing around in your .htaccess file, don’t or at least ask your host for some guidance on this because if you screw up the file your site goes down. Another good thing to do before you add anything to this folder is to copy and paste the code that is in it to notepad and save it. If you do screw something up you can quickly fix the file by reinstalling the original code.
First this is what an affiliate link should look like on your site and to search engines.
Example only
This link for example would be for signing up for Market Leverage – http://www.feedflare.ca/makemoney instead of it look like like this – http://affiliatetron.com/a.php?a=ml6645&b=21377&d=0&2=0&o=&p=0&c=6210&s6=&s7=&s8=&s6=&s9=
(yes I changed the link code so it is not really my link)
Now what I had to do to make that link I made go to Market Leverage was to add a redirect to it in my .htaccess file. Which was real simple to do.
This is what the redirect line looks like you’re going to put inti your .htaccess file,
redirect 301 /makemoney http:”your affiliate link goes here”
and after you add that line save it. As far as placing that redirect in the file just put it after everything else in the file or after the last line that way you don’t mess with your code at all.
Now when you view the source code for this site that link looks like a page in the site instead of a affiliate link and when someone mouses over it, again it looks like a page. Thats all there is to it really, a very simple process I had to share with you guys that I hope will help you out down the road.
If you have any questions about what I said in this post please leave a comment and I will help you like others have done for me.
- 10 Comments
- Tags: masking affiliate links
Hi nice post,first time here for me.I used to use sub-domains for masking but this seems a better idea.thanks
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ReplyI’m glad I found your site. I just cloaked an affiliate link as per your instructions. It looks much better.
Now on to the other links . . . .
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ReplyYa cloaking what I had to do was a bit of a pain but now it is easy to do!
ReplyI followed your directions but have a question. Since I’m re-directing the link will I see accurate click-through counts on the affiliate website? Since installing this re-direct I’m seeing the page impressions change but click-throughs aren’t.
Thanks for the article and you have a great website going? Looking for somebody to train?
Reply@Bryan:
Bryan – yes it should be accurate depending on which network your using. The redirect link you made goes to your aff link, then to where ever you aff link ends up. Once the redirect link hits your aff link everything starts to count. I hope your using a tracking software or site for your links link tracking202.com
What do you mean by am I looking for someone to train?
ReplyAfter looking at it again it looks like the click count was just lagging behind the impression count so it looks to be working correctly. I’ll look at tracking202 because I’m not using it. I’ve never heard of it until now.
My comment about training was a joke about if you were looking for someone to show the ropes to in affiliate marketing.
Again, nice site and this example of masking works great. Thanks.
Reply@Bryan(new comment) :
ReplyThats good and I am happy it is working well for you. Here is a link to a tracking 202 post I made if you want to read it. http://www.feedflare.ca/?s=tracking+202 and if you want me to show the ropes to you in aff marketing, well at least for what I am doing right now, let me know. I can tell you what I am building and working on and if your interested we can go from there.
I’m registered with tracking202 and watching the setup videos now. I’ll also read your post. I’m going to send you an email via your contact form.
Reply@Bryan(new comment) :
ReplySounds good, I may not get to reading it until tonight, I have company coming over but I will get to it and respond. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks Collin. I sent you the email. Have a good day.
Reply