Link Cloaking - The why, the where, the how

Great article. As a newbie to affiliates, for the most part, I’m going to try some of your techniques. thanks for the tips.

[Reply]

Thanks David - I’ve recently suffered quite a bit of link theft, so I was looking for a product like the Ninja Link cloaker. I’ve checked it out, and the cost of just one stolen link will cover the purchase price. Brilliant - thanks again. We’re going to miss these tips when you go back to school in September!

[Reply]

This article seems like one big sales pitch for the ‘Ninja Link Cloaker.’ $67 to disguise a link? I’ll pass.

[Reply]

I agree with Manthem. Shoe, why are you letting guest bloggers proffit from your well established site? This is like a payperpost article.

Apparently this 13 year old kid has a lot to learn. Decieving people into buying a product is a plan for failure. sure you`ll have short term success but given time, everything will backfire.

Flashforward 7 years from now, when everything has failed … David Wilkinson will gather all your email adresses and become the new spam king.

[Reply]

I think most of the stealing comes from the fact that a buyer can easily sign up to become an affiliate themselves and then get the product for half price most of the time. The writer still gets paid, so does the buyer, but the affiliate doesn’t - Cloaking isn’t going to save any of that.

[Reply]

And I personally don’t like tinyurl too. people can easily understand there is something hidden behind that “tiny” url . I can guess that easily if not other.
Php redirect is the best way I think.

[Reply]

I wrote a script that does this on your own server (as it still kind of looks suspecious to be directed offsite)…a few other things as well. Long story short, .htaccss and php. If you want to know more I’m working on a short howto tutorial which I’ll be releasing on my blog this next month. I’ll probably couple it with a small download to make it easy for everyone. (assuming you meet server requirements)

[Reply]

So Shoe, are we allowed to send you sales pitches now, and you’ll post to your site and your 10,000 readers will read it? If so, I’ll soon submit an “article” on how I make over $160,000.00 online every single month without owning a website or a product, and all I do is advertise websites with Google. Interested?

[Reply]

so david, did you use this very technique in this very blog post??

http://www.affiliatedefined.com/recommends/bonus-access.html >>>> affiliate >>>> http://ninjalinkcloaker.com/

[Reply]

The easiest way not envolving php (hey some of us grew up on perl) is to create a 302 redirect in .htaccess

[Reply]

I agree… I’ll just code my own using asp. I’m dying to know how this little man gathered so much marketing know how by the age of 13. I have a feeling there’s a Gipedo pulling the strings somewhere behind the scenes.

[Reply]

Shoe whats the big deal?! I come here to read shoe’s thoughts, not to see a “post” that is 4x as long as it needs to be that avoids a lot of major points of interest and only focuses on promoting a stupid product that can be recreated for free in 5 minutes.

[Reply]

Yeah he should focus on quality content and anchor text
</snarkiness>

[Reply]

Nice article, but also comes across as a sales pitch.

[Reply]

+1

[Reply]

Is there any chance it will be ported to ASP as well? Maybe I could help you out with this project. Sounds interesting…

[Reply]

13? Jesus, If I knew this stuff back then who knows we’re I’d be now!

[Reply]

That’s what I was just thinking!! What an incredible kid!!

I came up with some pretty profitable (or what I thought to be) ideas at his age too but never had the ingenuity to carry them out!! Kudos to you!!

[Reply]

Me too shoe… I think this little man needs to be taken down a notch. It’s pretty balzy of him to spam your 10k+ readers. I was impressed by his drive when I saw his first guest post. Now i’m annoyed that he has the sack to push link ninja or whatever that product was called on your loyal readers.

[Reply]

I don’t believe that this author is 13. If whoever wrote this can come up with all of this stuff about link cloaking, then they could probably come up with the thought that others would think it was neat that a 13 year old kid knows it. It’s a good marketing strategy because you get an instant wow effect coupled with “it’s so easy a kid can do it”, plus it makes the rest of us feel dumb. I think it’s annoying.

[Reply]

Hey Corey - Yep, that’s an example of one of the types of links.

[Reply]

For ****s sake. I’m not linking out again with proof. Read my comments on the last post if you’re looking for that: http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/07/11/upselling-the-why-the-where-the-how/

[Reply]

Thanks Marc. Glad you enjoyed the post.

And for the record - I have ethics. I don’t spam (and I /WON’T/ spam). I wrote about link cloaking. I showed people 3 ways to do it. I included, as one of them methods, the one I use (what would be the point of practicing and not preaching?) - And you have a problem with me using an affiliate link? Sheesh… Since you obviously don’t have anything better to do than make hypothetical, unfounded, degoratory accusations - I’d appreciate it if you just kept yout trap closed.

[Reply]

Great article, for a 13 year old you seem to know what your talking about my friend

[Reply]

Andrew - you recreate me Ninja Link Cloaker in 5 minutes and I’ll pay you $1000… If you think freaking MD5 encryption comes this cheap usually and can be done with .htaccess - be my guest.

[Reply]

Good point. Kind of like when the 47 year old dude pretends to be the hot 18 year old female to get attention in a forum. I think this may be someone’s clever marketing technique.

Besides, link cloaking is free.

[Reply]

That’s right Eric! Skip over all the content! All the actual tips and FREE services I mentioned. Highlight the one thing about it you didn’t like and spam the comments.

[Reply]

Come on man “md5 encryption” is not all that. Its an open encryption scheme free to anyone. Its available via native libraries in C# and php just to name 2 languages.

[Reply]

Yeah I kind of got that feeling to after hearing it would cost a good chunk of money.

I think tinyurl is also a bad choice since it is being overused for everything

[Reply]

Try googling him before you start running your mouth off. He is actually 13.

Think before you speak.

[Reply]

So you’re jealous and you’re attacking him because you can’t do what he’s doing - getting promotion from Shoemoney.

Great way to big yourself up - beat up on someone who is actually 13 (read his blog or Google him).

[Reply]

I’m not here to get into a fight, but how many people know PHP, C# and who else knows what, let alone has the time to package it all into a software package?

There might be better things out there, sure, (I invite you to check out all the options open to you before spending ANY cash), but I use NLC and that’s why I promoted it as part of the article.

[Reply]

David, not to be a dick, but MD5 encryption is built into PHP. It’s a standard function. Just call md5() with a string arguement, and you get the MD5 hash of that string. It’s not complicated.

Also, any competent PHP programmer should be able to whip up a solid PHP redirection system in less than an hour. Adding so-called MD5 encryption doesn’t help anything…at all. It’s a useless buzzword that has NOTHING to do with link cloaking.

Also, you aren’t really cloaking your links. You are masking them. The search engines following your links still will end up finding them as affiliate links. To fully cloak them you’d be using robots.txt to keep the search engines out. From what I can tell, you a aren’t using robots.txt, so when you drop links like that, the engines will see them as aff links and penalize accordingly.

[Reply]

Agreed. There are lots of flaws to tactics like TinyURL, and if you can get your own hosting, go for a software package, PHP, .htaccess, or run some form of a script on your server.

[Reply]

Even better - you promoted a product using one of the tactics I mentioned. TinyURL. Hypocrite…

[Reply]

Not trying to fight either. I’m just pointing out that md5 is not a big secret or technically difficult to use. I liked your guest post. It was well balanced and provided viable alternatives to the product your recommending.

Wish you the best of success
Scott

[Reply]

If you’re short and cash and can’t be bothered with TinyURL, try using PHP like mentioned.

[Reply]

What I can’t figure out is why you should need MD5 encryption to generate a redirect-URL..

I hope you don’t mean that Link Ninja is using some kind of encryption to protect its source code?

Then again, I can’t figure out either why Shoe is letting a 13y old fuck up his blog :-’(

[Reply]

I don’t think it’s such a problem to drop affiliate links into a blog post, heck that’s what I do in my blog. But there needs to be a balance. I think you dropped the Ninja Cloaker link 5 times, your own blog 6 times, and the helpful resources only 4 times.

I really enjoyed your last post and I wish you the best of success in future articles.

[Reply]

I found out the hard way about what not cloaking aff links does to getting listed in the SEs, heh. Very valuable post here, Shoe. Thanks!

[Reply]

‘only focuses on promoting a stupid product’

If you insist on me pointing out the facts… (colour coded for your convenience - two colours - wouldn’t want to confuse you)

http://www.techzi.net/when-will-they-learn.png

[Reply]

Thanks Scott - Sorry if I came across as a bit overly defensive/agressive. Just trying to hold my ground against the hoardes of people who aren’t keeping so much of an open mind as yourself.

David

[Reply]

Agreed, many simple hosting packages nowadays have PHP available. It’s a great resource for even the n00b, due to flexibility for marketers and bloggers alike. That being said, I need to brush up on scripting with it.

[Reply]

I am already using such cloacking… The advantage is that I can also number of clicks on the link.

[Reply]

This is truly great advice for anyone hoping to successfully promote an affiliate site online. Based on my own experience with affiliate sites, it truly is essential to use cloak linking. Especially since Google and Yahoo will only show one URL per search results page, if you choose to use your own site (or alternatively have the registrar forward the domain directly to the merchant site from your site) you will most likely get more action in the sponsored links.

[Reply]

That was the point obviously…

[Reply]

Thanks for the info, David.

Contrary to popular belief, not all of us familiar with “md5 encryption” and stuff like that.

Again, thanks and continues success.

[Reply]

The article was a giant sales pitch for a useless product and then he comes in here and is pretty aggressive towards anybody who comments about his tactics. Please skip the junky 13 year old articles in the future.

[Reply]

You said yourself andrew… you came here to read shoe’s thoughts… so why did you “waste your time” by reading anything past the first line of this post todaY???

[Reply]

Giant sales pitch…

http://www.techzi.net/when-will-they-learn.png

*cough* As for being agressive, I’m merely standing my ground. People accusing me of being a spammer, or suggesting I’ll become one clearly aren’t here for a constructive conversation… I’ll match them in turn, manners for manners. They want to bitch about? I’ll bitch back in their faces.

[Reply]

A very good sales pitch, I dont even know what your selling but Id like to buy.

[Reply]

This is a great guest post packed with tons of top notch info! Kudos on hiring this kid to help you out…

[Reply]

Dude, I downloaded your report, and its crap. Theres nothing in it, i’ve seen more genuine information in a digitalpoint post. Good thing i used a junk e-mail that I never check.

[Reply]

im a quick reader. I’m not gonna rule out anything thats not posted by shoe. I just expected a better editorial process on shoes part.

[Reply]

Exactly. If the post was 1/3 as long, maybe I would have let it slide without a comment. But several of the top commenters on this blog are here complaining about this. Unless you are getting paid for these posts shoe, dump the junk and keep up the good work. Just my 2 cents. (6 cents now)

[Reply]

Who cares most of the top commentors suck. Ever since Shoe installed that god damned “Top Commentors” plugin comments have gone to shit. Its mostly just a big circle jerk of comments consisting of “OMFG SHOE great post!” and “I totally agree”.

[Reply]

Definitely helps to have the links cloaked.

[Reply]

This post has been brought to you by the letters “M” and “D” and the number “5″.

I want a cookie for reading that.

[Reply]

I’m to lazy to check but if he’s doing a proper job the software should block google based on IP and referrer agent too.

[Reply]

the important question is…does this really work? anyone besides david have used this?

[Reply]

right because everything on teh intertubes is true.. lol..

[Reply]

Keep doing David… most of these whiners haven’t done 10% of what you’ve accomplished in the last few months. Some have come a long way however, they can at least identify your strategy.

Freeloading whiners… get busy.

[Reply]

How do you know he is trying to profit from Shoe? Maybe Shoe is letting him to help a kid out. What he learns now can set him up for a long time. Maybe a lifetime.

[Reply]

Hey David. Don’t sweat the haters. Anytime you market to a sophisticated crowd, you need to use different tactics. The blog readers here are experts (when compared to the average Internet user), cynics, and can smell a sales pitch a mile away.

Next time, just focus on writing an outstanding article for your end user and if you really MUST sell a product, do it with more sophistication.

One more word of advice, don’t respond to every Internet critic. They’ll just drag you into a shouting match and you’ll never win (it just makes you look worse).

[Reply]

hahahah, cloak like a ninja, sting like a bee

[Reply]

Good article David. I think the big problem is that you chose a tough product to sell to this kind of crowd.

[Reply]

Great post. I’m sure this guy will be making more money then his parents in no time.

[Reply]

any worries about like spyware and all that good stuff in this?

[Reply]

my point was simply that his top commentors spend a lot of time on the blog, and make comments on almost every post. Almost every top poster that commented complained about the post.

[Reply]

I have no issue with David, if he is 13 doing all that on his own. Power to him. I find it hard to believe that he doesn’t have a strong mentor involved, but what do I care?

His success doesn’t effect me in anyway.

My issue is simply that the post could have been 1/3 as long and covered the same issues, and only dropped a link to each thing once rather than 4-5 times.

[Reply]

I totally agree.

[Reply]

I use php, have for a long time now. The script I have set up goes way beyonds the benefits or cloaking your AF links to the use. I can track keywords, clicks, and manage all my links in one file making it easy to just change one link to an offer instead of changing all the links on every page it occurs.

Do you need to cloak? Nah but with the script I built and use it makes life a whole lot easier for me.

[Reply]

How can you all a 13 year old an expert at anything? Has he been doing this for 5+ years like most people “in the business”? Why anyone would take the time to read anything that he writes is completely beyond me.

People come to read this blog for a reason. You have extensive experience in the things you talk about. Having some 13 year old punk post an article is just a waste of time.

[Reply]

/infomercial

[Reply]

You bastard! lol..

[Reply]

Is there something like pirate link cloaking? I don’t like ninjas

[Reply]

Yeah - BBC is a big fat liar for instance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2006/12/14/child_blogger_feature.shtml

And Darren Rowse is ACTUALLY called Dick Cheney.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/02/13/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-blog-the-advice-of-a-12-year-old/

Go figure.

[Reply]

“His success doesn’t effect me in anyway.”

Then PLEASE stop complaining. As for a mentor… No-one as such. I’m friends with a lot of guys in the biz, but no-one ‘mentors’ me or helps me write my articles. Thanks anyhow - Andrew.

[Reply]

“Has he been doing this for 5+ years like most people “in the business”?”

I’ve been making more money with affiliate marketing sinec last November than most of the guys “in the business” have been. I’ve interviewed guys like Mark Joyner, Shawn Collins, Michel Fortin, Michael Cheney and a whole host of other people “in the business”.

Why woul anyone take the time to read what I write? Stop being so synical and shunning the work I write. And for the record - don’t call me a punk. I am NOT a male prostitute.

“Why anyone would take the time to read anything that he writes is completely beyond me.”

You took the time to read. To write. To flame. With any luck, I won’t be seeing you around, “punk”.

[Reply]

Yeah - if you track it all and play yoru cards right you can make sure the AdWords traffic is doing exactly what you want it to, and not just hanging about for the free reports.

[Reply]

Maybe several are - but I also counted (at least) three who weren’t - but were leaving genuine constructive comments, with a bit of advice here and there.

And heck… What does top commenter mean? “I can type ‘I agree’ and ‘Great post’ 30 times a month? Uh… Yeah. Great to see we set store and rank people’s social status based on the amoutn of comments they leave on an A-lister’s blog.

[Reply]

Hi,

Don’t believe this guy is 13, looked at his address in manchester, uk as well and does not seem to exist.

Looks like a marketing front.

Kevin

[Reply]

Further to my post, i would add that i think this guy is either related to day job killer author,(as mentioned in the above post) also from manchester, uk. Sorry I don’t buy it, but its a clever trick.

keep smiling

Kevin
UK

[Reply]

If anyone is interested, I created a free PHP masking and redirection script. Simply edit the settings.inc.php file included in the download.

[Reply]

yea, i’m sure he started when he was 8… didn’t you know they start teaching PHP coding in 2nd grade now? Plus in the uK you have your choice of electives, Phonics or Marketing…

[Reply]

wanna share?

[Reply]

Great article..just what I was looking for. I won’t use it for my affiliate links though..I use tracking on all my link outs, by my programmer had me attach this really long line of script to my url to get it to work..It makes me look like an amateur affiliate marketer in my viral strategy..Hope this works for me.

For all the haters out there, I don’t care if David posts a million affiliate links in his article. It gets the job done. I got the information I need and he was able to pitch his piece.

Again, thanks for the info. And whoa..13..I envy you..I wish I started that young.

[Reply]

Hey my comment disappeared. Anyway, just wanted to congratulate you for a great article. Learned a lot. Don’t mind all the haters, I learned a lot from this post.

[Reply]

blah.. its not like php is hard to figure out. I was writing simple BASIC programs on a TI-99 when I was in 4th grade. It just takes half a brain and some interest.

[Reply]

LOL, this is hilarious. Best of luck to you Blog Boy

[Reply]

I am surprised that after 94 comments and no one has worked out that this “Ninja Cloaking” thing

1. Does not use MD5 but URL escape. At least not from your “bonus-access.html” that redirects to Ninja Cloak
2. Depends on Javascript
3. Can be literally written in 10 minutes

In fact I have just written something similar here:

http://scott.yang.id.au/dodgyredirect.html

Well. I did not fork out $67 to check out all its functions, but like most products sold by affiliate sites, it is most likely over-hyped.

[Reply]

You can use a WordPress plugin called ShortURL (http://www.harleyquine.com/php-scripts/short-url-plugin/) . It works extremely well. Its got reports as well to show which links were clicked and how many times.

I use it on my blog

[Reply]

Man!! Tough crowd. I think it was a good idea letting him guest post on your blog. You must have been impressed with him to give him such an opportunity and I think he did a fine job with the post and an even better job handling some harsh (unwarranted, childish) criticism.

My first thought was, I wish I had know this stuff when I was 13… I wish there had been an internet when I was 13. You can guest post on my blog anytime David, I’ll even php redirect the links for you

[Reply]

I’ve just started messing with affiliate programs, already earned 300 last month

[Reply]

David, don’t let the people talking shit get to you. Your probably making more money than all of them combined=) People in Affiliate Marketing who bitch about other people for promoting useful products and services will never make it big because they don’t understand their own industry=)

[Reply]

Does not seem to exist?

…

…

LMAO! My last Clickbank Affiliate cheque seemed to get through alright.

[Reply]

LOL! As it happens - I have spoken to Chris before. Not even a proper conversation - just lil’ things, like when I was an affiliate for Project Black Mask, setting up a cloaked affiliate link hosted on his site… That’s all.

Hey - maybe one day I’ll have the pleasure of JVing with Chris, but till then, my friends.

[Reply]

Just a thought, but couldn’t you cloak the really long tracking links? Then you could cloak, track ‘n’ earn. There are a tonne of free ways to do it aside from Ninja Link Cloaker… Flick through the comments and you’ll find a few additional ones people have recommended.

[Reply]

Good article even if the “sell” was a little hard. Hope Shoe is getting a percent of your comissions for this!

[Reply]

I’ll admit, the first time I say a post by David, I was a bit suspicious, but then I thought back to when I was about 16, and was going about trying to set up my own affiliate site. Back in the day, Google bombing still worked and I got my site up to #2 for a particular keyword (with no actual affiliate links yet). It wasn’t real popular but it got a little bit of traffic. I had to get my dad to approve a CJ account since I was under 18, and the conversation ended with him saying “No.” That is prolly a big reason why I have a day job at 21. That and I have less drive. I assume when David asked his parents “Can I buy a domain?” they said “yes,” and they also said yes to his requests for them to sign up for affiliate programs and the like.

But with regard to your post here David, I must say you simultaneously got balls and lack brains. Your article is about cloaking affiliate links since having an affiliate link out in the open can hurt your credibility, and then after saying how to do it, you include one of your own. You are writing to a huge crowd of affiliate marketers or wannabe affiliate marketers. Many already knew this trick (I prefer the .htaccess approach myself.) Additionally, Shoe goes out of his way to say if a post of his is sponsored, or if he’s getting something out of it as in the case of Free Tshirt Fridays. If you thought no one would catch it, thats further evidence you really are 13, and if you thought that no one would care or that it wouldn’t hurt your credibility, well now you know better.

[Reply]

Why would you need to pay for the software or use tinyurl? Most of us here know html and can make a sales page and hide the affliate links in a page like http://www.yourdomain.com/suggests/48sales.htm the nice thing if you maintain control of your traffic and sales page and the affliate disappears at least you can change the sales page internally to redirect without having egg on your face. Come on Shoe this post and the last post bout airport is way off kelter

[Reply]

“Who cares most of the top commentors suck.”

HAHAHAHAH!
+1

[Reply]

Yeah this post does seem a little Spammy. I have seen similar products to Ninja Cloaker for free which in some cases are even better

[Reply]

lol.. I’m surprised you bothered to investigate it that far.

[Reply]

Link cloaking is almost a MUST!

[Reply]

Hey Joe, “suggests” “recommends”

Regardless of how good your cloaking is, using either of these two words in your link screams “i’m an affiliate…. give me money”

There’s little use cloaking your links if your going to give away that your an affiliate that easily.

Ofcourse, if your marketing to elderly aged gardeners… well happy days, but if your in the IM scene, you may want to consider other wise.

Good point about the maintaining control, theirs nothing worst than having a widely spread viral ebook filled with dead affiliate links.

[Reply]

see..the software says it’ll cloak the links so it’ll just show the actual URL instead of another file in another directory (www.site.com/suggests/).

is that even possible?

[Reply]

Alright David, so now that the comment storm has died down and everyone has forgotten about this string, is it true what they say about there being no such thing as negative publicity? I’m sure you got a tsunami of traffic to your site from this. What did the numbers look like and did they convert to any affiliate commissions for ya? Come clean, full disclosure buddy…

[Reply]

Haha… Scott - I hate to break the news, but you managed to get points 1, 2 and 3 wrong. LOL!

It /DOES/ use MD5. Not URL escape. It doesn’t depend on JS (it drops a cookie via pre-loading affiliate page and then flipping site that the user sees. And as for how long it took… Like I said to the other guy - write it in ten minutes and I’ll spin one thousand dollars your way.

[Reply]

No offence Eric, but you lack balls AND brains. It was pretty darn obvious I’d used affiliate links, wasn’t it? I was writing about an affiliate related topic, afterall. Next time I include affiliate links - I’ll make sure I fully disclose them for you - Eric.

No offence mate, but the way you started suggested you were kinda pissed at me because my parents think I’m smart enough to have an affiliate account - when you were three years older and they either didn’t trust you, or didn’t think you could handle it.

Best wishes…

[Reply]

No such thing as negative publicilty? Balls. Looking at the wider scope of things though, I’d say this has been (contrary to what the comments might suggest) great publicity. Are the guys commenting the guys who’d succeed in using my future product (yes - it will be a product) Affiliate Defined? No. They’re people who don’t take action. They site there and take the piss (subsequently get mauled) and run off bawling their eyes out. Simply because they have nothing better to do.

The right people have seen this the right way. The wrong people have seen it THEIR way. I’ve not lost anything…

[Reply]