How Does Link Cloaking Work?

Link cloaking is an Internet marketing activity that is surrounded by myths and half-truths. All affiliate marketers would have heard about link cloaking at some point or another, but few really understand how it works.

According to Wikipedia "Cloaking" is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser.

The myth is that link cloaking can get you banned from search engines, and that only "evil" people do it in the first place.

That's pretty accurate when you're talking about search engine optimization. Google hates it when you try to manipulate their search results with cloaked URLs. Therefore, they penalize any site that attempts to manipulate their search results using that tactic.

However, "cloaking" has a very different meaning and in affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer may want to cloak his affiliate link for a few reasons.

The first is to hide the actual affiliate link from being displayed in the browser. This helps the affiliate prevent commission theft, among other things. Commission theft happens when other affiliates replace your affiliate link with theirs while buying and deny you the commissions you deserve.

In niche markets where customers are not affiliate marketers themselves, this is a non-issue. However, in competitive markets like online marketing, search engine optimization and in the affiliate marketing niche itself, almost all potential customers are also affiliates.

This is especially true for products sold on ClickBank, since ClickBank actually encourages affiliates to buy with their own affiliate link.

The second is related to split testing multiple pages of the same website. It can also be used for testing different products, while hiding the actual URL of the page. This allows affiliates to maximize their commissions by finding pages or products that convert better.

Besides that, link cloaking can be used to display many different types of optin forms or popup offers which isn't possible otherwise. As long as you have the right software, this is pretty easy to do.

Cloaking links can also help the affiliate marketer get viral traffic. Just by bookmarking or sharing your cloaked affiliate link on sites like FaceBook or Twitter, they are in fact spreading your affiliate link. As a result, you get more people clicking on your affiliate link, and more commissions.

No matter how you choose to use link cloaking, make sure you use it responsibly. The difference between black hat link cloaking and white hat link cloaking is transparency. It's legal and ethical if you make link cloaking transparent for your visitors.


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Gobala Krishnan has been promoting affiliate products for over 8 years. He also runs an extremely user-friendly link cloaker software service at http://www.linktrackr.com