Contrary to popular belief with affiliate URL cloaking, there’s more to concealing all traces of an affiliate link than just making sure that the link by itself appears distinct. Altogether, there are plenty of traces of affiliate links out there that it could be tough to cover all the bases – and you should know that even a few link cloakers do not really cover every thing too! To be able to appreciate just what ‘tell tale’ indicators exist for affiliate links, you should look at them much closer.
Fundamentally the exhibited link URL is probably the initial trace of an affiliate link that needs to be hidden. It will take many forms, but most are pretty obvious so the minute somebody mouses over a linked piece of text, they are bound to notice that it leads to an affiliate link! To disguise this, you could use various procedures, including simply establishing some kind of redirect to enable you to publish a distinct URL and then have that URL redirect to the product web site.
Sadly, this isn’t able to address the subsequent trace of an affiliate link. Even should you redirect from a different URL, at some point when the person actually lands on the product web site, they will see the affiliate URL in their address bar. When they do, the game is up! Preventing this is more challenging and calls for some fairly creative coding, or the use of superior types of redirects so that you can prevent it from ever happening.
Last but surely not least, there are other traces of affiliate links which are still bound to be present. As an example, some sites actually publicly advertise because you could become one of their affiliates, and this immediately increases the chance that a customer may want to ‘take’ your commission for themselves!
Removing these final few traces is definitely near to impossible, however there are strategies 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 calls for yet more sophisticated redirecting – but this is a strategy that is really and truly successful.
End of the day, it is close to impossible to hide the fact that your link is an affiliate link completely. Ultimately, your customers are bound to figure out that you’ve sent them to an affiliate product. Really, the true question is if you can delay that realization for long enough to generate a sale… or not!
Through the use of advanced url cloakers, viewers even the toughest of affiliate links can actually be masked pretty well. As such it really should not be a problem for you to ‘hide’ your affiliate link so long as you must.
