Make More Money With Affiliate Programs By Hiding Links
ADVERTISEMENTSI have written earlier on how to improve affiliate earnings, now lets see how we can make even more money by hiding the affiliate links. Hiding the affiliate links not only helps you make more money, but is also good for SEO.
It also helps to increase the clicks on the affiliate links as visitors won’t be able to type the URL on their browser without your affiliate code and therefor will help you make more money with affiliate programs.
Another advantage is that you will only need to change your affiliate codes at one place if they ever change (Text link Ads changed their codes two times).
Here’s an example (from John Chow) that you can use to hide your Text Link Ads affiliate link (replace my affiliate link with yours)
Signup for Text Link Ads
http://tinyurl.com/2ud2zl">
You are being taken to the correct page.
If the page does not load after 5 seconds,
http://tinyurl.com/2ud2zl">click here.
Save the above code to a text file and rename it as tla.php (or anything you like). You may also want to place it in a separate folder. Now all you have to do is to replace all the affiliate links on your blog with the redirects.
Example: For eMiniMalls, I now link to https://johntp.com/recommended/eminimalls.php instead of the real affiliate link https://chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=johnpthomas278
If you have used lots of affiliate links on your blog, use the method I mentioned here to replace them in a few seconds.
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Posted on February 27th, 2008 | Category: Make Money Online |
David Bradley
February 27, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I’d not recommend the Chow approach with TinyURL, who’s to say that their terms and conditions won’t change and have them snaffling your affiliates. I’m pretty sure there were rumors of this with at least one URL crunching site grabbing amazon associate links.
All this is best done with rewrites in .htaccess and/or javascript rewrites in the page itself. Both are invisible/transparent to readers and spiders alike.
db
JohnTP
February 28, 2008 at 10:06 am
John Chow did not recommended TinyURL, thats my Text Link Ads affiliate link you see on the sample code. You have to replace it with your affiliate link.
Thanks for commenting David.
Techblissonline Dot Com
February 28, 2008 at 10:52 am
But John, google does not like redirects with meta http-equiv=”refresh”….
Techblissonline Dot Com
February 28, 2008 at 11:00 am
this practice is very risky…Find the Google guidelines here -
The relevant text is:
Sneaky Javascript redirects:
When Googlebot indexes a page containing Javascript, it will index that page but it cannot follow or index any links hidden in the Javascript itself. Use of Javascript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of Javascript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in Javascript than in a noscript tag violates our webmaster guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the Javascript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the webmaster guidelines to embed a link in Javascript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.
JohnTP
February 28, 2008 at 12:01 pm
The redirect has a line of code that tells the robots not to index or follow the link.
Techblissonline Dot Com
February 28, 2008 at 12:39 pm
If the page in which this script is going to be placed is going to be noindexed or nofollowed, then the script is not necessary and you can place direct links as googlebot is not going to index or follow links on this page and it wouldn’t care what you do on that page which is unimportant to it…
Techblissonline Dot Com
February 28, 2008 at 12:41 pm
moreover, since you are going to noindex and nofollow the page thereare no SEO benefits from this page as search bots will not be interested in these pages… and no PR juice is passed on to it…
David Bradley
February 28, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Ah, sorry, my misunderstanding. Certainly meta-refreshes are out, as are obfuscated links. But, server level rewrites and redirects are apparently fine as long as they’re permanent (301)
db
Sree Pillai
February 29, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Hi John,
I just thought of sharing how I shorten/hide affiliate URLs. http://teck.in/t/?tiny
Mike - Twenty Steps
March 1, 2008 at 7:59 am
Yeah the meta-refresh can cause problems with Big G so an easier and much quicker method is to create a php page with a single line of code:
document.location.href=”http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com”;
You’ll just need to take out the spaces in the tags for this to work
Mike - Twenty Steps
March 1, 2008 at 8:01 am
Ackkk….even with the spaces it didn’t work in the comments so you just need to wrap the line above with a call to begin the script and one to end it
cashmarble.com
March 1, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I do agree with you john. I normally refused to sign in with an affiliate if i know it…
James
March 5, 2008 at 4:01 am
I’ve seen this done so many times before but could never figure out how to do so myself. Many users won’t click on links when they see the affiliate ID, assuming right away it’s about you making money and not a decent product. I’ll give this one a try!
-James
http://www.infodoorway.com
Business Opportunities Guru
March 13, 2008 at 4:42 am
There are a lot of great methods for hiding affiliate links and they really do increase your earnings, because people are more likely to click on them. The php script mentioned in the comments works really well for handling this, it is one I have used successfully in the past.
maneesh
March 13, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I went to chow’s site.. but wasn’t able to figure out how masking affiliate links this way will help in seo.. can u shed some light john?
Gio Suryo
March 16, 2008 at 1:37 am
Hi John,
Thanks for the tip there. I implemented it in my website immediately. Your instruction was easy to do and to understand. The link is working nicely, and once again thank you!
TechWiz
June 6, 2008 at 1:27 am
Actually, I am trying out a site like TinyURL except it asks the user for a keyphrase instead of randomly assigning a string. Check it out and let me know what you think. http://www.oneryng.com
Temi
June 9, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Thanks for sharing this, your instructions are very understandable.
Creating a mouse over is also a a good way, it does hide it a bit more than if nothing was done. A mouse over is a fairly simple step to add when inserting your links.
John
June 16, 2008 at 3:11 am
I love the idea of saving money.
Mike @ Forex Trading
July 22, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I’m using the Javascript method of hiding my links, but in Firefox 3, it sees right through them.
anthony @ cheapcheez.com
July 29, 2008 at 3:32 am
Hay John . Does the spider not index the link ,and page or just not the link?