Affiliate link cloaking question

[josh01]

Hi Guys,

Cloaking my affiliate links has been on my to do list for an eternity. Could anyone reccomend an SEO friendly link cloaking tool that is easy to use?

Many thanks

[Simmo!]

Best way (and not just for this reason) is IMO to create a text file of links and get a redirect script. That way you only need to update your affiliate links in one place and the redirect script gives you tracking opportunities too. Easily achieved in PHP.

[MichaelCorfman]

And if the redirect script is in a directory excluded from the search engines with a robot.text file, or if you include nofollow on the link itself, then Google will definitely not chase the link to see any associated redirect that takes place through the script.

[josh01]

Sounds simple enough. Only problem is, not all my sites are in php, some are just plain old html. Any advice on implementation for sites built this way?

[RayUK]

As long as php is installed on the server it should work.

[Nandakishore]

According to Wikipedia, "Cloaking is a blackhat 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."

[Simmo!]

According to Wikipedia, "Cloaking is a blackhat 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."

Yes this isn't really cloaking, it's redirecting. Use of the NOINDEX tag takes care of the indexing but you're not actually hiding a link or page as such.


In regards the HTML/PHP thing, that doesn't matter as RayUK says - as long as the server supports PHP (which is 99% likely) you'll be fine.

[RayUK]

I think in this thread we are talking about a different meaning to 'cloaking' (at least I am, I assume the others are too) where you have a link to the casino that doesn't show the affiliate tag. That is, instead of something like:

http://www.casino.com/afftag=skafhgf...g969696...blah blah

you have something like the simpler:

www.mysite.com/go/casino.php

The links appear the same to the search engine as they do to the browser/surfer. This also places the aff tag code in one place so if it changes there is less work for the affiliate.

[RayUK]

PS What Simmo said (I think we posted at the same time) - and yes, redirecting is a much better term for this than cloaking.

[GCG]

Ok could someone let me know how to proceed if I have all my links like this :

site/go/casino1.php etc

what code must be in casino1.php ?

(for robots.txt I block /go ?)

Thanks !!

[RayUK]

casino1.php will be a file with something like this in:

<?php
    header("Location: http://www.casinosite.com/whateverYourAffLinkIs"); 
?>

Replacing www.casinosite.com/whateverYourAffLinkIs with the appropriate link. At least that is how I do it, there are a few ways of doing it, not just using php too. But that works for me.

[RayUK]

And yes, disallow /go/ in robots.txt - I also nofollow the links into that directory too. The reasoning is that disallowing in robots.txt stops the spiders crawling the directory's contents but doesn't stop them following the links into and then out of it. The nofollow does stop that. I am not sure if this reasoning is correct as I have seen differing opinions on how that works. I do this really to stop the /go/whatever stuff appearing in the index rather than any link juice flow considerations.