Hiding Your Affiliate Links - Revisited
Back on June 27 2007 I posted an article on Protecting Your Affiliate Links. This method used both Javascript redirects and a meta-refesh code.
A few days ago Kumiko of Cash Quests made a post titled the “New Internet: Now Without Affiliate Links.”
This is basically along the lines of my original post about protecting your affiliate links but with a twist. Instead of setting up one directory with all your affiliate links, you would create a separate directory for each link. Each directory would include an index.php file which would be used for the affiliate redirect.
So instead of linking to an affiliate link such as www.emonetized.com/go/blogmastermind.html I could use www.emonetized.com/blogmastermind/ ( go ahead and test them 
)
Setting up seperate directories for each affiliate link is a pretty clever idea and could work well for some websites. However, on websites that are going to use several dozen or even hundreds of different affiliates links, I’d agree with Derek that managing one folder for each affiliate link is tedious.
A few days after Kumiko’s post, Derek Beau made a post titled “How To Hide All Your Affiliate Links With Only One File.”
This method allows you to use a single php file for all your affiliate links using a PHP redirect file and HTACCESS for masking the links. In fact, you can customize the .htaccess file to make your links look like anything.
I’m not going to go into details about how this last method works because he details everything in his post but so far it’s one of the best solutions for hiding your affiliate links that I’ve found.
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Thanks for the informative post
Now just gotta find the right affiliates…
Great post Tim - and it’s funny you mention Kumiko, because I recently used that technique and starting hiding my affiliate links too. I like having the directories, probably because I’m only a member of a few affiliate programs, so its not that much effort creating new directories.
is it ok with the TOS? BTW, thx 4 the info.
www.indradiky.com
[…] Masking affiliate links protects both the affiliate and website visitor for a number of reasons: […]
If you want an even better/easier way to hide your links you should take a look at my new plugin for wordpress that let’s you manage such links from wordpress admin without having to write any php , html or javascript code.
you can find out more about this free plugin here:
http://patchlog.com/wordpress/hidden-affiliate-links/
Yes, it seems that more and more people know when it is about an affiliate link and won’t click them, so hiding them may be vital
Hi,
I’ve found that by far the easiest way to hide affiliate links is to use this redirection plugin: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/ It even has a good stats page, so you can track your clicks.
Hope this helps
I just finished writing an in depth article about another method of hiding links from hi-jackers that might interest your readers. This uses sub-domains instead of directories and includes full reporting from the web host provider.
This is good info, I really like the 2 examples you used quite sneaky. But for those of us that don’t like code or know code I guess a plugin would be really helpfull
Hi Tim, I am using the 1st method with lots of sucess & It is also very easy to implement. Another method would be using a cloaking software
It would be nice if there was a wordpress plugin to help you find affiliate links. Does anyone know of one?
This is a very good technique, will give it a try, i think it will come in very useful on my site. thanks again
How can we hide affiliate links in blogger.
did somebody tried or any suggestion
hey I heard that before but later I forgot that. now after seeing your post it stuck me again.