How to Mask Your Affiliate Links

Masking affiliate links is very important, and in this lesson, I’m going to show you how to do it with ease. A lot of affiliates do not mask their affiliate links and they’re loosing money because of lost traffic because of it. Here are a few reasons why they need to be hidden:

• Google can recognize an affiliate link when they see one. It’s a simple algorithm really, if Google crawls a hyper link that forwards to another hyper link, it can easily assume that the link is an affiliate link and it will either lower your Quality Score (if promoting through Google AdWords) or lower your PageRank (if promoting through SEO).
• People are getting smarter and they notice when they see *.*.clickbank.net…or if they see a hyper link with a number next to it, they’re getting sent to a website that is trying to sell them something.
• If you’re promoting your website through e-mail marketing, SPAM filters are getting smarter every day and if one affiliate screws up, it ruins it for everyone trying to use similar hyper links from the same domain.

Here are a few methods to solve this problem:

The META Refresh Method

This method basically instructs your web browser to automatically refresh the web page after a given time interval–in this case 0 seconds. Simply create a web page, something like “RegistryMechanic.html” and place this in the HEAD section of the web page page:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com" />

After you’ve created that page, you simply need to place a hyper link to “amazingdesignsecrets.html”. But WAIT, there is an extra step that most webmasters forget to do, you need to add rel=”nofollow” to your tag. Here is an example of how it should look:

<a href="amazingdesignsecrets.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Amazing Design Secrets</a>

The reason you need to add NOFOLLOW to your REL element is because Google will still craw your redirect and detect an affiliate link. You need to tell GOOGLEBOT to not craw that hyper link.

The Server Redirect Method

This method is a bit more advanced, but is probably the most effective in my opinion. To create a redirect on the server, simple create a dynamic web page in whatever language your server supports (ASP, PHP, etc.) and create the redirect in the code. Here is an example of a PHP redirect:

<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com' ) ;
?>

Here is an example of a ASP Redirect

<%
Response.Redirect "http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com"
%>

Here is an example of a JSP redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

Here is an example of a CGI/Perl Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com");


The HTACCESS 301 Method

If you have an Apache server, you have the option to have a 301 redirect in your HTACCESS file. You need to edit your HTACCESS file and add the following:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^amazingdesignsecrets.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com/$1 [r=301,nc]