TinyURL has been abused by spammers and as a result many applications including browsers such as Chrome reveal to the visitor the destination URL to help them avoid being send to a porn site or some other nasty places they may not wish to visit. Chrome actually directs visitors to an ugly preview page before they get to your site – this will guarantee the loss of visitors. So, for affiliate links it’s pretty dead in the water if you are trying to mask a link.

Someone mentioned frames – cloaking using frames was once a good method but ceased to be a long time ago. IE for example will block cookies from domains other than that shown in the browser address bar – result, you lose more commissions than you protect! The visitor gets to your site but your cookie stands zero chance and you make nada, zip, nothing. IE’s standard privacy settings are something most people will never change and as the majority of web users still use the crappy MS browser you should never use frames unless you only want to sell to Firefox users ;-)

I realize your method here is a straight PHP redirect – this is not a problem for cookie setting but…it is not very secure and more often than not the raw affiliate link will still appear in the browser address bar. If you want to track your links as well, this method falls short too and it’s more time consuming than it needs to be. Also, a growing problem is parasite software – I explain this on my blog too if you want more information but basically a PHP redirect is vulnerable to such trickery too.

There are so many options for cloaking links and this is already turning into a blog post as opposed to a comment. However, there is a lot of bad information out there on this topic, a lot of software that can do more harm than good too, but there are some little jewels as well and whilst there is still no perfect way to guarantee that all your affiliate links will be correctly tracked to you, there are ways to maximize your chances. A quick search for link cloaking on my blog will lead you to some revealing information not often found if any of your readership are interested.

Maurice TCH

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