One of the things I untaught myself quickly was the fear of stolen affiliate links. If you decide to cloak your affiliate links, do it for the right reasons. Do not purchase a product that will cloak links for you (you can do it yourself just as easily with only basic html knowledge) and whatever you do, do not cloak your links because…

…Other affiliates will steal your links
Yes, a knowledgeable person who understands how affiliate links are structured could replace your affiliate id with their own in the website address and “steal” your affiliate sale. The problem with this reasoning is that if they belong to the same affiliate program that you do, they can just create the link with their own affiliate id and purchase the product from that url anyway. There is no reason they have to steal anything.

But maybe more to the point: most affiliates don’t buy affiliate products.

The one circumstance where that might not be true is when an affiliate is ready to sell a new product. Then, that affiliate would buy the product once in order to be fully educated on the product’s features. But even in that case, the affiliate salesman is still buying it from their own link, not yours.

…Casual customers remove the affiliate link
Listen, the casual customer knows nothing about the world of affiliate sales. They don’t care one way or another who pays whom as long the product addresses their needs and is within their cost considerations. Not in a million years are they going to remove part of the url, not because they are maliciously “stealing” your sale and not out of ignorance either.

…because Affiliate links are too long
Web surfers are used to lengthy and incomprehensible web addresses. Users will think nothing of it at all.

That said, one reason you would cloak your link is because Google Adwords does not allow competition between identical display urls. So if you are promoting a product through Adwords that other people are promoting, your options are:

1.) Bid higher than your competition - inadvisable unless you know you can make a solid profit over and above your advertising costs

2.) Make up your display url and hope Adwords doesn’t notice - Adwords will disapprove an ad for reason of “Inaccurate Display URL” if they don’t like the one you list. But more often than not, a creative but otherwise closely associated url will pass their review process.

3.) Purchase a domain - When you purchase a unique domain name for your affiliate product, within the forwarding process, you can cloak the original url with your affiliate id using very simple javascript. (see resources) And some registries will forward and mask the url for you at no additional cost.

If you choose to cloak your affiliate links, make sure you do it for the right reasons. Precaution is fine, just don’t give in to unreasonable fear that everyone is tampering with your affiliate links.

Tags: cloak links, Cloaking Affiliate Links, Myth of Cloaking Affiliate Links, Purchase a domain