I’ve been reading a lot lately about affiliate link hijacking and link cloaking. Do you recommend any particular link cloaking software or technique and/or are there any particular ones to steer clear of? I saw one ‘Covert Affiliate’ that in addition to cloaking affiliate links puts a tracking cookie on the visitors computer even if they don’t click on the link. They talk about having the ‘unfair advantage’… that concerns me that if you’re doing something ‘sneaky’ that it could actually bite you in the butt down the road.
This is a great question, actually, and everyone who is involved in any sort of affiliate program where you get paid a commission on completed transactions (for example, Amazon’s Associates program), needs to pay attention to this situation!
The problem is that unscrupulous adware, spyware and other malcontents have software that they install on your computer – sometimes with your consent – that also automatically rewrites affiliate links on pages you visit. For example, you would then innocently pop over to the Web page for my book Growing Your Business with Google and click on the ‘buy this book at Amazon’ link, thinking that you’re cool that I’m going to make an additional $0.75 on the transaction through the Amazon affiliate program.
Surreptitiously, however, that link is rewritten to use someone else’s affiliate code, giving them the credit – and commission – for the sale.
Not a huge big deal, but now imagine that instead of visiting my site, you’re actually on the Web site of your favorite charity or organization and you want to show your support of the organization by using its affiliate links, thereby making a contribution to the group by doing your regular shopping (a great way to support charities, in my opinion!). But, you guessed it, the charity doesn’t see a dime and instead some lowlife gets the affiliate income instead.
I know about the problem, but for possible solutions, I turned to my friend and colleague Shawn Collins, who runs the great Affiliate Summit conferences (and yes, there’s another coming up in July at Disneyworld and I’ll be there, speaking about weblogs and blogging!)
Here’s what Shawn had to say in response to this question:
There are two ways you can go about cloaking your links: set them up yourself or buy a program to automate the process.
Personally, I do it myself. In some cases, I use a little mouseover script, but that’s just to trick the casual observer – it won’t beat the schemers and spiders.
In the past, I’ve also used frames to cloak affiliate links. This has its limitations, but it’s quick and easy.
Another method is to purchase a domain and use the domain registrars forwarding service (free with most domain registrars) to have the domain redirect to your affiliate link.
The technique I use most often is the .htaccess redirect. An .htaccess file is a plain ASCII text file you place in the root directory of a Unix server.
The .htaccess technique is much easier than using other redirects, because there’s no HTML required. All of your redirects are in one text file.
One thing to bear in mind when cloaking your links is that you should add the afsrc parameter, so legitimate adware affiliates will recognize that you are an affiliate and not overwrite your cookie.
If you want to get a program that will help you set up the cloaked links, check out CBmall, search for cloaker or cloaking, and you will see lots of programs to consider.
As far as that program you mentioned that “puts a tracking cookie on the visitors computer even if they don’t click on the link” – stay far away from that one!
That is known as cookie stuffing, and it’s a big taboo. By doing that sort of thing, you’re no better than the thieves you’re trying to beat in the first place.
There’s a third solution that Shawn didn’t mention: using third party URL redirection services like Click Thru Stats that can make it easy to cloak your affiliate links too.
Thanks for your info, Shawn!!
Dave:
I also are having a issue but rather then the link not being cloaked it is and it shows as http://binauralfrequencies.com/?hop=whereuare which is mine but then when one gets to the actual buy page at the bottom it is not mine it is
[affiliate = viglink.1ikybeumxbtnz]
Not sure how/where it is being changed but any help is GREATLY APPRECIATED. My actual web page is http://www.becomespirituallyawake.com
I finally made it throught a php redirect. And I also removed the .php extension from the file with .htaccess so that the link is exactly the same as I wanted it to be in the first place through .htaccess. Cheers!
Very interesting info in here. I was just searching for a solution to my problem and end up reading all this new usefull stuff. I actually use .htaccess to redirect my aff links but I just discovered that CJ links don’t work properly like
Amazon.
I’m using something like rewrite rule ?go/link1/ http://www.affiliatelink.etc/etc [R] (i don’ have the .htaccess here)
And it works for amazon but not for CJ when I build a customized link. If I take the CJ link as it is, provided by the company (home page, category page) it works. But when I build it to go to a customized section of that website and then generate the affiliate URL, it stops working, and in stean of going to the section I want it goes to another section predefined by the advertiser. I wonder why. Is this because the customized link itself contains a redirect?
This is a great subject Dave and you cover it thoroughly. I should do an article myself as I offer a free link cloaking program to subscribers of my own mailing list.
It works on frames and generates either a html or php file you just upload to your server. This particular link appears as a page on my site but is actually the affiliate sit in the browser window.
Thanks for a great article
Joel, yes, that is possible. It’s called “link hijacking” and is one reason you want your affiliate links to be encrypted / encoded if possible. Sites like Commission Junction make this encoded URL easy to produce, but I’m not sure about whether Amazon has that capability yet or not.
Hi Dave,
Is it possible that you are getting clicks with your Amazon affiliate IDs but someone is getting the credit for the sales.I ask you this because there is no single day without sales for a particular niche but for the past 7 days I see no sales in spite of all my hard work. And it is a very popular product.
Dave, I have been looking for information and trying to understand how people can steal your affiliate commissions for awhile.
To be honest, I still don’t quite understand this and how it can be done.
Also, if I sell my products through Clickbank- can someone somehow collect an affiliate commission even though they go through my link?
Third, does creating a 301 redirect prevent this problem?
Im so confused! Its one of those things that- I don’t know what I don’t know. For all I know, someone could be stealing all my money.
Thanks for the info. I actually thought you were going to expand on the URL redirection method with a different domain, but you skipped it.
I will explore it elsewhere then.
Nice post BTW
Hey Dave, is there anyway to know your link is being “jacked”? I run a review site and consistently make sales from most of my products (Clickbank products)but there is one product (not Clickbank) that i know for a fact is a high profile high converting product to which i send consistent traffic and havent made one sale from. Thanks for the info.
Cheers,
Mark
that is lot of hardwork actually u need to install a program into users computer which is hard to do
Hello
This is more of a question than a comment
I’ve got an acer aspire 3680 and it’s got windows media addition on it,now as stupid as I’ve been in purchasing this laptop have tried loads of ways to cloke my links could you advise me in any way my knowlage of prowgramming is minimal
Terry
For avoiding link hijacking, have you checked out Cloak And Tracker yet? It runs on both PC and Macintosh platforms and lets you swap links on the fly as needed.
For instance, if you have an ebook with your affiliate links in it that goes viral (a GOOD thing), and then the site your promoting goes KaPuT (a BAD thing) — all you need to do is change the link via Cloak and Tracker and BAM!, you’re salvaging all that traffic. And the tracking is an added bonus. Plus there’s no messy FTPing of the files that is required with many other solutions– it does it all for you.
They just reduced the price to $27 (from $49) so it’s a great deal: http://www.cloak-and-tracker.com
I’ve wrote a small article dedicated to easy cloaking methods using JavaScript and PHP for others that are not so good with programming
http://richbeaver.com/webmasters/link-cloaking-step-by-step-guide/
Thank you for this information. It has become a veritable jungle out there, and constructive information such as yours is most welcome and valuable.
I will follow all those links and find out more!
Thanks for the helpful information. I actually just wrote an article for our affiliates on how to cloak their affiliate link.