Unraveling The Secrets Of Link Cloaking
...an inside look at the various ways to display, and protect, your affiliate links.
– by Ginette Degner

Lately there has been a lot of concern about whether or not the search engines are devaluing affiliate links. Some evidence indicates that Google is seeking to identify the most common affiliate programs' telltale dynamic link structure with an eye toward assigning them less relevance (i.e., penalize them) or even to ignore them completely in terms of their algorithm that assigns relevance based in part by link popularity and reputation.

This problem, coupled with the nefarious practice of affiliate-link-hijacking, has spawned a bevy of "solutions" aimed at disguising such links to make them less easily detectable.

The questions remain – are these efforts worth it? ...are they effective? ...and, which of the strategies are the best overall?

Link Cloaking is born

The many reasons why the final destination of a link might be "cloaked" has spawned an emerging product market eager to provide "solutions" to both real and perceived problems. However, without a basic understanding of how these systems work, you're liable to cause bigger problems than the one(s) you're trying to solve.

At issue is the fact that, while link cloaking can be effective, not all of the strategies are search engine friendly. Some are completely unindexable and could even land you in the penalty box. With that in mind, let's take a look at the various link cloaking strategies with an eye toward their effect on search engine ranking.

Hiding a link's destination

The reasons for "cloaking" a link's destination include traffic tracking but more often than not the thinking is to eliminate the distraction effect that a long dynamic link tends to have on a prospect who otherwise might be making a buying decision. Another reason is to reduce the possibility of losing credit for affiliate sales by discouraging (or eliminating) the practice of removing an affiliate tracking ID prior to a customer completing a sale.

These issues, coupled with the recent concern over whether or not Google is targeting affiliate links with an eye toward eliminating pages that are using them, have added all ...