URL Cloaking: What It Is and How to Master It? | Free
URL cloaking (shortening URL) is a method of masking the affiliate link provided by an affiliate program or a special. URL cloaking is another technique used by affiliate marketers to hide the affiliate ID.
4 Tips: About URL Cloaking
- While hiding your URL address can help with marketing, it is not always needed and can confuse how people normally move around online. As a reason, only use URL masking when necessary.
- It makes the link shorter, less visible, and more attractive to visitors. While the term “anonymity” in and of itself sounds ominous, URL cloaking is a standard and helpful practice in the world of online marketing.
- People who do affiliate marketing want to make money by selling products or services for other companies. They do this by putting links on their websites or social media pages that send people to the company’s website. If someone clicks on the link and buys something, the affiliate gets a commission.
- People can have their commissions stolen by malware that is loaded onto their computers without them knowing. This software watches the websites that people visit and looks for affiliate links. When it finds an affiliate link, it changes the unique ID code in the link so that the person who clicked on the link doesn’t get the commission.
After we know What is URL Cloaking?. this is an example:
So, where does this link lead? In this case, we have used our Getresponse affiliate link, which directs users to the Getresponse homepage. Simple that is a link cloaked in action.
If a visitor clicks on this link or types it into their browser, everything remains on my site until the very last second, when sent to the Getresponse servers. Because of this simple process, if a visitor buys a service through this link, there is a low risk of taking my commission.
How Does URL Cloaking Work?
Cloaking an affiliate link works by putting the visitor through a URL redirection. It is okay if you are not a whiz at technical. Let us begin by explaining the overall concept in simple terms.
Here’s how your browser handles links (URL cloaking):
- When you click on my cloaked link above, your browser requests our site for the content of the page /recommends/Getresponse–WordPress.
- Next, my site answers that the page does not exist and directs your browser to another location to obtain the content.
- Then your browser reads the response and reaches the new URL without your action.
Link Trusts and URL cloaking
People are intelligent. The visitor will not click on an affiliate link and prefers to continue browsing on the same website.
Through the link, the perceived trust in that link increases. It is as if it is a reference to something on your website.
Cloaking affiliate links leads to an improved click-through rate, as has been seen time and time again.
What would you rather click on the link or continue browsing?
- Clicking on the link with letters and numbers stacked inside makes it look as if the site owner is getting some malicious refund for sending you there.
- Or clicking on a link will take you to another page on the same site.
How does a URL appear and be controlled as an affiliate link?
So, instead of linking to a product page on another site with arbitrary numbers and product IDs that make no sense to your audience, you may alter the URL slug to whatever you like.
That is how controlled an affiliate link is to cloak the identity of a partner How the link cloaking appears as URL cloaking?.
For example:
https:// ( your domain name)/(product)/(tt3e)/ links to a tools email marketing app. But the URL is not descriptive at all. You can not look at that URL and get an idea of What leads to that link.
If I cloaked this URL, I could easily present you with example.com/go/tools-email-marketing-app, and you’d know just by looking at the link that it probably leads to an email marketing app product.
As a result, URL cloaking leads to more qualified visits to your affiliate links. They are more likely to buy since they know what to expect.
Tracking Of URL Cloaking
- Link cloaking is good for SEO since it helps maintain a balance of internal and external links. If your site contains an excessive number of links that direct people to other websites. But Google and other search engines will rank your site lower.
- Another feature of link masking is the tracking history of visitors to your affiliate links.
- Knowing which affiliate links are more popular with the people you want to reach is really important. This helps your links work better and bring more success.
For example, with tracking, you may discover that your audience prefers clicking on links related to email marketing Apps. But not on links related to sports products. So you should focus more on promoting Apps and write more articles on this topic.
Can I mask my affiliate link without having a website?
- Technically, by using services like bit.ly. You can hide your affiliate links without a website. But there are certain downsides.
- A cloaked URL that you cannot customize is often a nonsensical string of letters and numbers. You can not change the destination.
- You should go to the service and watch them until you find the one you want to copy. It is not easy to put links in your content as you type.
Free affiliate URL cloaking WordPress Plugins
- WooCommerce cloaks affiliate links
- URL Shortener Pro
- Auto Affiliate Links
WooCommerce cloaks affiliate links
- Help you cloak affiliate links in your online store. It is simple and free to install.
- However, you can configure three types of URL redirects: 301, 302, and 307.
- The most important feature of this plugin is that it adds a “Disallow” command to your robots.txt file.
- The shortcoming of this plugin is that it does not have any tracking functions.
- If you want a premium plugin with advanced tracking capacity, you should look at another choice on this list.
URL Shortener Pro
- The best thing about this tool is that the shortened and redirected links load incredibly fast. Your visitors will not have to wait for the URL of the landing page to open.
- URL Shorter is a must-have WordPress plugin for Webmasters looking to take advantage of social media. This tool helps you create a short version of your URLs that you can share on social media. They can be memorized and fit into Tweets, Facebook posts, and more.
- You can choose how to redirect your short links between processes 301, 302, or 307. You also have complete control over the link flow.
- One downside of this plugin is that it lacks a built-in widget for your sidebar. It means not redirecting or shortening links directly. You must open the plugin and create a cloaking URL from the main interface.
- This plugin will also assist you in hiding affiliate links, ensuring giving you the chance to get credit for purchases made through your website. External sites may get credit for a purchase if the user goes directly to the product page and skips the redirected URL.
Auto Affiliate Links
- Auto affiliate links tool will automatically add affiliate links to your content. You can manually set affiliate links and keywords to your content.
- IMPORTANT: Your content has not changed in any way. After viewing the content will be adds links.
- If you prefer to select your keywords and add your links manually, you can do this from the menu setting.
- In General settings: you can set the URL to be cloaking if you want them to be added on your homepage or not, and several other options.
- You can limit the number of links in every article. The frequency ranges from very low to very high.
Conclusion
Link Cloaking is the process of masking the URL of an affiliate link to obfuscate the affiliate ID. It makes the link shorter, less visible, and more attractive to visitors. Instead of linking to a product page on another site with arbitrary numbers and product IDs, you may alter the URL slug to whatever you like. Link cloaking is good for SEO since it helps maintain a balance of internal and external links.
