Affiliate Link Cloaker – Simple To Use …and Free
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The best way I’ve found to cloak affiliate links is as follows, it’s quite simple to do and it works well… and if it’s good enough for Mark Dulisse and Willie Crawford then it’s good enough for me!
Making a Simple Redirect Link
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Using Notepad or other text editor that you use, open a file and save it as “index.html”, ”index.htm” – or whatever file type you’re using.
Then insert the following code in the HTML
section of your page.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh”
content=”0;url=http://youraffiliatelink.com“>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Just copy this code, making sure to replace the words highlighted above in red, ”youraffiliatelink”, with your own real affiliate link.
Save the file, placing it in a directory (a folder) that you have created in the root folder of your site and which you named after the product name. When you want to refer someone to this great product, you just refer them to your new url – as in:
http://www.yourdomain.com/productname/
If you have any questions please ask away in the comment box below…
NOTE: It’s not advisable to use a javascript encryption method to do cloaking – in fact I’ve understood that it’s a big no-n0 because encoded javascript is the sort of thing scammers and hackers use so has the potential to be harmful which is why Google wave a red flag as of course they know this.
Free WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin
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If you use WordPress, there is a good plugin for cloaking affiliate links, called ’Link Cloaking Plugin for Worpress’ (surprisingly!) which you can download for free. Make sure you read the ‘readme’ file as you have to carry out a couple of additional small steps after you’ve activated it.
Quick & Simple Cloaking
If you just want to do a really quick and simple cloak then go to:
enter your long affiliate link, click on the ’shorten’ button and Hey-presto! there you have your new link 
Hope you find these methods useful – any questions or comments please add them in the comments box below…
Tags:affiliate,cloaker,cloaking,Free,links,software,url
Tags: 
I’m having real trouble setting up link cloaking on my hostgator website (to be). I have 2 questions about your method:
1) If the notepad link cloak is saved as index.html or index.htm won’t that conflict with the home page index.html?
2) Does this method of cloaking require the server to have Apache with mod_rewrite module enabled?
Many thanks for your comment.
Margaret
Hello Margaret,
Yes, it certainly would conflict with your main index page IF you uploaded it to the main root folder – but you don’t …if you look again at the instructions above, you can note that we make a new folder in the root domain (in the example below I’ve called the new folder: your-affiliate-folder), calling it whatever you want, and the new index page that you make goes in there.
So the finished, full url of that folder and page you are making looks like this (I am leaving the : and . out just for the purposes of showing it here – of course, you’ll put it in as normal):
http //www your-root-domain.com/your-affiliate-folder/index.html
As index pages open by default, then you won’t need to add the ‘index.html’ in the url, so it can just be:
http //www your-root-domain.com/your-affiliate-folder/
2. re: the Apache part, I am not very technical but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t – I am also with Hostgator and have no problem with this method.
Just try it and see – it really is quite simple – and you will see whether it ends up on the right page when you test-click your link after setting it up.
Let me know if you still find you have any problem.
Good Luck!
Oh, I see.
I’ll give it a go!
Thanks so much for following up.
Margaret