An Overview Of Link Cloaking 

What Is Link Cloaking?

What It Is, What It Isn’t...

And How A Simple Text File And One Line Of Text Performs Magic

The purpose of link cloaking is to provide a “pretty” URL that gets invisibly redirected to another page and can be tracked if desired. It’s as simple as that.

I have seen a lot of questions about cloaking links. I have seen a lot of bizarre answers as well.

So first let me clear up a few myths.

Link cloaking is not meant to fool people, fool AdWords/PPC editors, steal commissions, or set cookies in an unethical way. While cloaking is usually a part of these practices, it has to be combined with other techniques to do the job.

Link cloaking is also not site cloaking. I’m referring to hiding the URL from users through the entire transaction. This is done using frames. I highly recommend you not do this for two reasons.

First, unless you really know what your doing, you may not get properly “cookied” and thus not get your due commission.

Second, regardless of what other “experts” say, framing a site has been proven in court to be a copyright violation. So if you are swayed by others to follow this route despite my warnings, at least get the permission from the owner of the site that is being framed. All it takes is one pissy site owner, or even a non-pissy site owner having a pissy day, to cause you a massive amount of legal and financial grief.

So again, the purpose of link cloaking is to provide a “pretty” URL that gets invisibly redirected to another page and can be tracked if desired. It’s as simple as that.

Let me give an example to clarify the process.

I work with an affiliate CPA network called Hydramedia. When I get a link for one of their offers

it looks something like this (not a real link):

http://www.lynxtrack.com/afclick.php?o=0000&b=5szt79sm&p=0000&l=1

It’s long, it’s ugly, and the real link provides my affiliate ID. We’ll discuss why these factors are

problematic in the next section.

What link cloaking allows me to do is change that long, ugly, URL into something very appealing like:

http://www.mydomain.com/recommends/thisgreatproduct

Besides being more appealing to the customer, it has the advantages of being key word specific (if you want it to be) and with the method you will learn today passes through your own server for total control and data capture.

We’ll get into the specifics of how this works later, but for now let’s see what happens, in general, when link cloaking is used:

1. You place your “pretty” URL on a web page, blog post, comment on a blog, or in a forum signature (if they allow it, Don’t Spam).

2. When a person clicks on the link they are directed to your server.

3. You have “code” on your server that captures the incoming link and translates it to the
final, ugly, destination and sends it there with the codes needed for you to get your commission.

Is that all there is to it? Basically.

But step three can have several sub-steps that parse (break apart) the link into useful pieces of information (like where the link came from and what time it was received) and store it in a text file or a database for further analysis.

But in it’s simplest form link cloaking is nothing more than those 3 steps.

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