Cloaking Long Links Using TinyURL

23 Mar 09 8:41 pm

hi bob ... its generally a good practice to use the full URL if you can (particularly for your WP pages) and its less maintenance. tinyurl is great for twitter or email marketing where a long link could get broken across two lines. tinyurl is generally reliable but there have been known outages. the other option is use a cloaking WP plugin.

as for SEO google is not too enthusiastic about lots of affiliate links, even if you disguise it with a tinyurl and a nofollow tag, it will still get indexed, so it probably wont make too much difference.

prob the best thing you can do is focus on the anchor text e.g. for an affiliate link on your blog, try using something like "learn more about this..." as your anchor text

HTH

30 Mar 09 4:00 am

Hi Bob,

I agree with Jason - don't use TinyURL. If their site goes down, then your links won't work.

Here's a Wordpress plugin that I've had some success with:
"http://www.harleyquine.com/php-scripts/short-url-plugin/"

I modified it slightly, so it could live in its own dir. You can snag it from here:
http://felthos.com/downloads/shorturl.tar.gz

Alternatively, you can find other plugins at the WP Codex. Do some other searches as well.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=short
and at
http://www.wp-plugins.net/

HTH. Cheers!

_KJH

06 Apr 09 11:29 pm

So many people get so worried about link hijacking, but the reality is that the only people who are going to be "hijacking" your commissions are fellow affiliates: They will notice that a link is an affiliate link, and they might be inclined to think "ooh, that's interesting, I can create an affiliate link myself and buy through my OWN link!"

To me, it seems like this is only going to be a problem if you're promoting products to people who know about affiliate marketing. The average person interested in a dog training product, or a learn spanish product, or a weight loss product... they're not going to know about affiliate marketing, and they're not going to know how to "hijack" your link. The thought won't even cross their minds.

The people who are most likely to "hijack" are people looking at products in the "make money online" niche: They're the ones who know about it, and if they're going to do it they're going to do it. They'll know what you're up to, link cloaker or no link cloaker. This is one reason why a lot of affiliates in this niche will offer "bonus" products for people who purchase through their links: To encourage people not to buy through their own links!

So that's a lengthy discussion on why you shouldn't be paranoid about this: Now for the practical part.

Use redirects.

A simple redirect will do pretty much the same trick as a TinyURL address: You send people to your redirect, which might live at yourdomain.com/recommends/thisproduct and then that will automatically redirect to your affiliate link, which will send people to the merchant site.

The only way your visitor will know they've been through an affiliate link is if the merchant is a little lazy with how they create their affiliate links: There might be a little tell-tale reference at the end of the URL in the address bar. But there's no way you can fix that yourself.

We have a lesson on this in Affilorama. https://www.affilorama.com/site-building ... -redirects

29 Apr 09 9:56 am

Thanks to all that replied to my question. I see that ClickBank is now generating an encrypted HopLink, so at least for ClickBank, does that mean that this is no longer something we need to be concerned about?

This Forum is excellent - one of the best.

Thanks again,
Bob