Before
I found Affiliate Link Cloaker, I had bought and tried
several other similar programs. Having tried several,
I'd have to say that I liked ALC the best, partly
because of ease of use, and partly because it leads
you step-by-step through the process of creating a
redirect page that is search engine friendly.
For
the uninitiated, a "cloaker" allows you
to hide those affiliate page URLs when you compose
the links on your web site. Many "super affiliates"
use server-side redirects, or URL redirection for
this purpose, but both run the risk of being penalized
by the search engine, if the spider finds it.
Why
cloak your links? Well, according to cloaking advocates,
as many as 40% of affiliate commissions are "hijacked",
meaning that an unscrupulous buyer replaces your affiliate
link with his or her own before buying a product,
or a site visitor simply views the destination URL
in the status bar and then "chops" it, removing
the affiliate information and going to the vendor's
site without your affiliate ID. Perhaps some people
think they will get the product more cheaply this
way, and others just don't want you to get the money
you earned by interesting them in the product.
Regardless
of why links get "hijacked", it makes sense
to "cloak" them, if only to make them look
neater both on your web pages and in any promotional
e-mails you may send out. Advocates also claim that
shorter links have higher "click-through"
rates than those long, complicated affiliate URLs.
Affiliate
Link Cloaker is an easy-to-use desktop utility that
helps you create a page that contains a hidden redirect
to your destination URL. It creates pages that the
search engines at least won't penalize (since spiders
don't read javascript), and hopefully will like (since
ALC prompts you to fill in fields for page title,
keywords, and description, as well as encouraging
you to put some actual text on your page).
If
somebody really wanted to "hack" your affiliate
link, it wouldn't be that hard to do, though, as the
URL is simply transformed into a piece of code that
most programmers or hackers would instantly recognize.
The point is, it would take them a while, and I consider
affiliate link cloaking sort of like locking your
doors. If a professional wants to steal it badly enough,
they will ... amateurs will be deterred, and look
for an easier target.
Of
all the "cloakers" that I tried, I found
ALC the easiest to use. Not only does it create the
cloaked page, but it also allows you to upload it
directly to your site, if you so desire. I also liked
the fact you can designate your own page meta tags,
and create a page that will apparently be "search
engine friendly".
This
is a simple, straightforward web master tool that
I'd recommend to anyone who has the slightest concern
about using unmasked affiliate URL links.
