Do you trust cloaking affiliates plugins?

Hi there,
I recently found something really weird on my site and I am concerned about the legitimacy of the cloaking plugin that I use-Thirsty Affiliates. I have disabled indexing with robots.txt my affiliate urls - mysite.com/go/...
And these URLs appear in the Search console as Blocked by robots.txt. That's fine.
But today I saw an URL that has never been added by me in Thirsty Affiliates and its name is /go/20bet.life.
20bet.life is a brand I have never heard before. I haven't added cloaked URL and I don't work with them?
Do you think I am hacked and somebody is stealing my traffic or Thirsty Affiliates are adding their own tracking links?
By the way what is the alternative of these cloaking plugins?
How do you manage all of the tracking links?

Can be done through the .htaccess but I use the Dinomatic's plugin called Nonaki. It's light, it's simple, it does the job and Levon (the creator of the plugin and several wonderful gambling themes) writes good code and takes care of any questions.

As for that site, never heard of it, but sounds like if you haven't added it yourself, your account might be exposed, can't know for sure without additional information.

I do not choose thirsty affiliate links but am familiar with it on sites I acquired from others.

My choice is easy affiliate links. I am more comfortable with it's functions so that makes using the same thing on multiple sites smoother.

If you suspect you site even remotely might have been hacked, be sure you have a full backup of the site. You should also have a separate backup of the database. If you are unclear how to do that you can use something like wpmigrate to get one or just go in to phpmyadmin and export a full backup.

Change all admin passwords.
Consider changing the db password after that.

If you have phpmyadmin you should consider a search of the database for 20bet.life to see if it exists in the db for thirsty. The visit or go link itself is stored in wp_ta_link_clicks_meta.

If the visit url does exist in the db, someone inserted in in some way if you did not.

As for trusting affiliate link management, yes at least some of them can be trusted, I have never heard of specific issues with thirsty and although thy might have a vulnerability, I have not seen anything that indicates that.

Security is very important, no matter what plugins you use and regular backups are essential.

Rick
Universal4

What thirsty affiliate does is redirecting some routes on your site. For this, it sets up redirects for a route (or url), in your case will be whatever you set it (/go/link1, /go/link2) etc.

1) do you see /go/20bet.life setup in your WP dashboard -> thirsty affiliate? -> site hacked.
2) as universal4 said, do you find it in mysql? -> site hacked.
3) can you find it in .htaccess? -> site hacked.

If you do find it in mysql or .htaccess, then someone injected it, which means it has to have login credentials to your site/db/whatever.


Is the link active, for example, it redirects to a specific url?

Most likely scenario:

There's a possibility that someone linked to www.yoursite.com/go/20bet.life from another domain and Google discovered the url (even though it leads to nowhere). So Google tried to follow the link, but it was blocked by your robots.txt, and rightfully reported it in Google Console.

In the same way, you can inject whatever content (let's say adult keywords) in routes which are done poorly. But this is another thing.

I would not worry at all.

The plugin "Easy Affiliate Links" works fine for me, if want an alternative

I will try Easy affiliate links. Thanks

I use the thirsty affiliate plugin because after I checked a few it works the best

No, i dont trust. I had a bad story with it.

We also used thirsty affiliate plugin, no problems so far with it

Not sure about the hacking part, but Thirsty Affiliates adding their own links is fishy. I ditched them a while back because of similar issues. Currently using Pretty Links, way cleaner. As for tracking links, I just manually handle them.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bluecitygh

Not sure about the hacking part, but Thirsty Affiliates adding their own links is fishy. I ditched them a while back because of similar issues. Currently using Pretty Links, way cleaner. As for tracking links, I just manually handle them.

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Do you recall if any additional research led you to this decision?

Do you recall , did you happen to find the links they were inserting anywhere specific, like a specific table etc?

Rick
Universal4

I use Thirsty Affiliates. Previously, I used Pretty links but I gave up on that plugin.

It seems to me that both plugins are not bad. The fact that a site is hacked is not necessarily the fault of that particular plugin (but you can't rule it out 100% either).

However, saying that something in Thristy Affiliates is suspicious sounds strange. As if they were substituting their own affiliate links.
It's a bit like a conspiracy theory.

Me, the only problem I have with all these plugins that shorten links is that if someone has firefox and has a popup and pop-up blocker then my shortened link is dead, a blank page comes out. Regular links open normally. I've tried changing the redirect types as well so that the page doesn't open in a new tab but in the same one and that doesn't work either, still a blank page. I have not found a solution to this problem. Fortunately, most people use Chrome.

Trust in cloaking affiliate plugins depends on developer reputation, user reviews, and adherence to guidelines. Research thoroughly, consider user feedback, and prioritize plugins from reputable developers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by conormurphy

Trust in cloaking affiliate plugins depends on developer reputation, user reviews, and adherence to guidelines. Research thoroughly, consider user feedback, and prioritize plugins from reputable developers.

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Exactly why researching such plugins here at the GPWA makes sense, so the ideas and opinions you get are from affiliates themselves who can provide such opinions based on personal experience using such.

Rick
Universal4

If you don't trust cloaking affiliate plugins, you can use the redirect features of SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math. You might already have either one installed, which would also prevent you from having to activate an additional plugin.

I use thirst neevr had any problems like you mentioned so is most likely isolated withy our site, check your logs to see if there is anything strange going on

It is possible that any of these companies can be bought and someone changes something.

Surprising to hear this could be done with thirsty links as thought they had a good reputation in affiliation.

I am kinda leaning toward that also onlinebetdotcom,

Although it is not my first choice I think they have a decent rep also, and if there were serious issues directly with them I think a lot more GPWA Members would likely discover or at least discuss the possibilities there was an issue with them.

Not saying it couldn't happen but they seem to have enough share in the market there would be quite a few discussions taking place surrounding the issue.

The initial issue the op had was most likely related to something else, altho he never confirmed that.

Rick
Universal4