Contrary to popular belief with affiliate URL cloaking, there is more to hiding all footprints of an affiliate link than just ensuring the link by itself looks distinct. Altogether, there are many traces of affiliate links out there that it may be difficult to cover all the bases – and you should know that even some link cloakers do not really cover every thing too! In order to value just what ‘tell tale’ signals exist for affiliate links, you need to look at them a lot deeper.
Essentially the exhibited link URL is probably the initial trace of an affiliate link that needs to be hidden. It can take many forms, but most are quite obvious and so the minute an individual mouses over a linked part of text, they’re bound to detect that it leads to an affiliate link! To conceal this, make use of a variety of procedures, including simply creating some form of redirect to be able to publish a different URL and then have that URL redirect to the product site.
However, this neglects to address the next trace of an affiliate link. Even if you were to redirect from a different URL, at some point when the person definitely lands on the product site, they’re going to see the affiliate URL in their address bar. When they do, the game is up! Avoiding this is a lot more complicated and requires some fairly resourceful coding, or the use of superior types of redirects in order to prevent it from ever happening.
Last but definitely not least, there are other traces of affiliate links which are still bound to be present. For instance, some web sites actually freely advertise the fact that you could become one of their affiliates, and this immediately increases the chance that a customer might want to ‘rob’ your commission for themselves!
Eliminating these final few traces is really close to impossible, however there are procedures where you can sidestep the actual sales page of the product completely, and thus prevent yourself from ever coming face to face with this scenario. Doing so needs yet more superior redirecting – but it’s a technique that is really and truly efficient.
End of the day, it is close to impossible to hide the truth that your link is an affiliate link completely. Sooner or later, your customers will almost certainly figure out that you’ve sent them to an affiliate product. Really, the true question is whether you can delay that realization for long enough to generate a sale… or not!
Through using advanced url cloakers, viewers even the toughest of affiliate links can actually be masked pretty well. As such it should not be a problem that you should ‘hide’ your affiliate link for as long as you must.
