Cloak your links

[pocketnut]

How do I cloak my links? Anyone......? Anyone.......?

[baldidiot]

There are a couple of ways, the most common way is to use the meta refresh tag:

Create a webpage for each link and put the following code in the header:

meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com" /

- put it between <> - I originally did it like this and the thread redirected


Then you link to the page you have just created and the user will automatically be redirected to the relevent link.

You can also create one of those "We are connecting you" pages and change the 0 in the above code to something like 5. Then it will hold the user for 5 seconds before redirecting.

The second way is if you're using a CMS such as joomla (I vaguely remember you mentioning that your site was joomla based, but I could be wrong). Often they have a links feature - in joomla this is weblinks (under components). Just create a new weblink, add your affiliate code and then when writing your content you can add it with a couple of clicks.

Finally, you can use javascript to do an onclick rewrite. But it's simpler to do one of the other two...

[RayUK]

There are several ways to do it and baldidiot has covered most of them above. The one I use uses php. Create a subdirectory off of your domain, for instance www.yourdomain.com/go/

Then in there put a php file 'casino.php' with the code:

<?php header("Location: http://-AffiliateLinkGoesHere-"); ?>

Call the subdirectory what you like ('go' seems popular), call the php file after the casino or site it leads to (well call it anything really, but this makes the most sense to me), and replace the location URL with the appropriate affiliate link.

Any of the methods above or this one work fine, just pick one you like the look of.

Some reasons I do this is to make the link look a little more friendly to the surfer if they hover their mouse over it and look at the bottom of the browser. I also disallow the /go/ subdirectory in robots.txt and nofollow the links on my site to the /go/casino/php files. This is to stop the SEs crawling and indexing the redirect gubbins really, not (just) to avoid giving link juice to the sponsor site URL. The main reason I do it is because then the affiliate linking code is in just one place on my site (the php file) and is thus very easy to change it if I have to.

[universal4]

Of course you old timers know this is where I will jump in and recommend fastclick....(no I do not own it, and bytheway, the free version works well)

Fastclick requires php and mysql, or there is a flat file version that doesn't need a database.

It will allow you to cloak all your links that you want, keep track of all click stats and even show ip's of the most recent clicks...

Once you use one of the methods mentioned so far, any time a program changes links, or you need to redirect a certain casino's traffic elsewhere, you just change the link in the database, (or the redirect page) and voila links are changed or redirected instantly site-wide....

With fastclick you should restrict the fastclick folder from the robots in robots.txt and also should do this when using the other methods....

Rick
Universal4

[pocketnut]

My Brain has officially sprung a leak...Ill figure it out. ILL just try them all.....Thanks guys.. for the help..


THE POCKETNUT

[clearlyportals]

Easiest way.

Check to see that you have .htaccess (most servers do )

In this case, create a file called '.htaccess' and plonk it in the root folder on your web server. Once you have done that, add the following script:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^visit/some-casino\.html http://www.somecasino.com

Now you can link to sites like: http://www.mydomain.com/visit/some-casino.html

...and it should take you to http://www.somecasino.com

You can then add something in your robots.txt file such as:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /visit/

For good measure

<!-- a-->