For years I always knew I should be cloaking my affiliate links somehow but usually it takes me years to get around to doing something like this. Until a year or so ago nearly all the sites I built were standard HTML sites and I know there are pretty easy ways to do some PHP redirects and URL rewrites but I never really took the time to learn how to do that or to get it all set up.
Luckily now that most of the sites I build are WordPress based there are a number of plugins that will handle affiliate link cloaking. But why should you care about cloaking your affiliate links? Well, one of the best list of reasons I have seen was on Rae Hoffman-Dolan’s post about Eclipse Link Cloaker. She lays out 7 good reasons for cloaking affiliate links. The two that are probably most important to me are:
It is a way to make a datafeed unique – It isn’t much but every little bit of uniqueness you can bring to a datafeed site helps
Ability to easily track clicks – It is always nice to be able to match up the traffic numbers I see with the numbers reported by a merchant or network. If they are different there is usually something wrong on one end of the equation.
And I do like Eclipse Link Cloaker. It is fairly easy to use, has quite a few features, and all in all is a very useful affiliate link cloaker. I have it running on quite a few sites. It runs $57 and is well worth the price.
But the affiliate link cloaker I have been using more and more is CloakPIG from the folks at BlogPIG. I use their CSVPIG program all the time for building datafeed sites and their free NukePIG plugin to delete all the messed up datafeed pages I build before I get the templates and everything correct so I decided to try CloakPIG. Here are a few of the main features of the program:
1. Automatic cloaking of links – Once you install CloakPIG it will find all the outbound links on your page and cloak them. It is pretty much all automatic so there is very little you need to do. Whether you have 10 or 10,000 links on your site it cloaks them all. You can have it cloak just post and page content or all content to include sidebars and the like.
2. Whitelist and Blacklist links – Choose domains you never want to cloak or always want to cloak. You can have it cloak links to all external domains or just the ones on your whitelist.
3. Customize your cloaked link – You have options on what your cloaked link will look like. It can just be a random string of numbers and letters or you can set it to the page title, anchor text, or a random tag from the post.
4. Preload cookies – This is a pretty “evil” feature I haven’t used yet. Basically it will take the links on your page, “visit” them, and the cookie is then set on your users browser. Most affiliate programs, merchants, and affiliate managers don’t like this and honestly there are very few instances where it would really be useful for me so I just leave it turned off. But you can turn it on with a click of a button. You can adjust the number of cookies to preload per page, what percentage of cookies to preload, and you can add domains to preload cookies based on the referring domain. Use this feature at your own risk!
5. Autolink keywords – Whenever you type a specified keyword in CloakPIG will automatically turn it into a link. Pretty nice if you commonly write posts about the same product or a specific merchant.
6. PageRank Hoarder – Specify a percentage of links that will pass on PageRank
7. List of links and total clicks – See how many people clicked on a specific link.
There are more features and more functionality in CloakPIG and you can try it out for only $7. If you like it you will only pay $77. The support of CloakPIG and all of the BlogPIG products is top notch as well. If I have a question I usually hear back from them in a day or two.
So try CloakPIG for 7 days for only $7. Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.
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