How do I hide affiliate links on my blog? | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

I use a plugin called Pretty Link – it lets you change the link to one that matches your URL and you can choose to nofollow the link. It's pretty easy to use!

All the links you get from flexoffers/cj and the likes, if you just copy paste the whole code, includes the nofollow already. And even if you cloak them google knows about the redirect and can easily figure it out. 

The main advantage to cloaking the links (at least according to me and I am not a seasoned blogger) is to easily switch out the links behind it. There are a lot of times (like tax promotions) you will have a link to some particular promotion but have to switch it out to a general one, then instead of changing it in 10 different places I have to change it in just one. This works for general recommendations too. For example, you might be promoting a theme and if it goes out of business or you no longer like it anymore, you can just switch the url at the back and you will be selling the new theme.

I use GoCodes for my main site, it is almost the same as Prettylink, I just happened to start with Go Godes but not I have been using the Pretty Link for my other sites. Either one is fine. You can noindex & nofollow in either one of these plugins.

SPF – This may be a dumb question, but did you go back in and change the links to the new ones? I had to manually change the links in every post where I used the affiliate links. I don't know if Go Codes is supposed to replace them automatically, but Pretty Link doesn't.

SPF, I see both those links are just raw links and not cloaked? May be I am missing something? 

For example you could put a carquotes term and add the link in GoCodes as http://carcostcanada.com/aff?blah123

so that should give you a cloaked link as sustainablepersonalfinance.com/go/carquotes you should add that to "click here" in your last para. If you stop promoting carcostcanada.com and start promoting carcostusa.com, you can go to the gocodes panel and just switch the link, the spf.com/go/carquotes will now go to the new link whereever you already have them. This works the same way as seasonal promotions.

If you want to automatically change all "autos.com" mention to your affiliate links for example, try the smartlinks plugin. That will link autos.com phrase/word to spf.com/go/autos everywhere.

Sustainable PF said:

Lost me Suba

When in edit more of the article, on the "keyword" – do I need to put something like sustainablepersonalfinance.com/recommends/autos.com instead of the affiliate URL?  Then the plugin knows to send links to the affiliate URL via my "recommends" URL?

Yes. Having .com as part of the url is not a good idea, but ignoring that, yes, you can have to insert this url as the hyperlink for your keyword.

I name all mine after the affiliate programs. Like if the anchor is HostGator, I use sooverdebt.com/hostgator/ as the cloak. Just makes it easier for me to remember.