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

Eric – NarrowBridge.net said:

I'm another satisfied user of Pretty Link. I highly recommend it. I have the free version, but the paid version lets you automatically insert links based on certain keywords too.

Thanks for the additional endorsement, Eric. I installed the free version yesterday. I'm glad I had sense enough to post this question in the forum, because I knew nothing about this particular plugin.

sooverdebt said:

I disclose affiliate links, but I still prefer the "normal" URLs – people have told me before that the affiliate URLs look like spam, and I agree. For people who are less computer savvy, a crazy-looking link may cause them to think you're trying to load a virus onto their computers.

This makes sense to me. I think an affiliate link should be obvious and not completely cloaked as to hide your intent, but making the URL more readable makes sense to me. I've seen some sites use "go" codes for that.

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

Invest It Wisely said:

sooverdebt said:

I disclose affiliate links, but I still prefer the "normal" URLs – people have told me before that the affiliate URLs look like spam, and I agree. For people who are less computer savvy, a crazy-looking link may cause them to think you're trying to load a virus onto their computers.

This makes sense to me. I think an affiliate link should be obvious and not completely cloaked as to hide your intent, but making the URL more readable makes sense to me. I've seen some sites use "go" codes for that.

Cloaking is essentially hiding the url and it is replaced with a url that is more readable.  I agree and disagree with you regarding cloaking. I agree on the disclosure but I disagree that cloaking is hiding the intend. CJ gives a url as some random abcdef.net/complicated-url/some-added-numbers. Apart from the readability, I never liked clicking on those links. Before I started blogging I didn't know what affiliate links were, so displaying it as adcdef.net and domain.com/go/keyword didn't really make me trust the blogger better or anything. As long as there is disclosure about affiliate links I am not going to make every single link painfully obvious and or disclose it for every single link. Depends on the comfort level of each blogger though. Just my 2c.

I think that is fine so long as the referred link does not strip out the information completely (honestly I don't know if that's possible). For example, if you made the link go to Amazon.com and somehow stripped out everything so it looked like a vanilla link to Amazon.com — that would be deceitful in my eyes.

All of my affiliate links are nofollow, so Google doesn't frown on them.

Invest It Wisely said:

Glencap said:

Invest It Wisely said:

Since you asked, no, I don't think you should cloak your affiliate links. That seems like a deceptive practice to me. I don't think you have to disclose every single link, if they are not cloaked, but why wouldn't you be up front about that? I have affiliate links on my own site, and it is obvious where they go. :)

What about Google? I heard that Google is not too thrilled with too many uncloaked affiliate links. Also, I read that cloaking is not a matter of being deceptive, but more a matter of securing your link against theft. Then, there's the issue of visitors fearing that an uncloaked link is actually spyware or a computer virus.

I tend to fear that about cloaked links. I like to see where a link is going. :)

 

I'd have to do some more reading about what Google thinks or how it affects the theft.

I need to read up on this more myself.

Eric – NarrowBridge.net said:

Most of the SEO related topics have tons written on them. For everything from how Alexa really works (http://geeknizer.com/alexa-ran…..exa-works/) to follow vs. nofollow (http://support.google.com/webm…..swer=96569) there is something useful written on it.

If you are ever in doubt, spending 10-15 minutes reading on a topic can do wonders. Also, be sure to read up on ProBlogger, as it is a great resource that often covers related topics.

Great advice. Thanks, Eric.