If you participate in our affiliate program, this post should be beneficial to you. It’s how to link with your affiliate code but conceal your affiliate link.
Affiliate links are usually not search engine friendly, so making them a bit more friendly is always beneficial. There are FOUR EASY STEPS to setup your affiliate links and this can work for any affiliate links you might have.
This not only helps you make the links friendly, but if the affiliate link ever changes, it’s as simple as changing one line in your affiliate link file and it’s updated on all of your pages.
**Updated**
Regarding what to name your affiliate file(s), I originally said to name it unique to your own site. After thinking further, I realized that a lot of webmasters want to completely hide who they’re working with from the search engines. If this is something that is a concern for you, here are two additional steps to add:
- Name your affiliate file with common words found on all sites. Example names: file.php, html.php, page.php, add.php
Or make it even tougher and use their names: google.php, search.php, yahoo.php, googlebot.php
- Now prevent search bots from following your links. Use the rel=”nofollow” when linking to your affiliate file. For example, if you name your affiliate file “google.php”, link to the file like this:
You can also use your robots.txt file to block them from reading your affiliate file(s).
Disallow: /path/to/google.php
Of course, the last two steps are only necessary if you want to disguise who you’re affiliated with. I am seeing more and more affiliate links in the SERP’s ranked really well, so if you don’t need to hide things, shoot for being ranked. Having your affiliate link ranked well translates into more money in your pocket!
**Updated Again**
Muhammad added a JavaScript technique of setting up your affiliate links I thought was worthy of a read.
9 comments ↓
Thanks for referencing to my post! I personally like the LinkWorth affiliate program pretty much, and thats the reason I chose to use my linkworth affiliate link as an example.
Thanks again!
No problem Muhammad. It’s a great thing to do and makes updates much easier down the road. I updated the part about what to name your files.
Is it just me, or is it wierd that webmasters have to mask affiliate links?
I mean, an outbound affiliate link, one would think, would be relevant to the site content, is hand edited and reviewed, and technically, would not be considered a paid link. Right?
MegaD
Thanks for the useful info Muhammad.
not a problem, Camping!
Webmasters hide affiliate links because they know some people that are interested may realize it’s an affiliate link and copy the link, paste it into a browser and then remove the affiliate’s code before clicking.
JavaScript can be used to show a normal link in the lower location window and when clicked the full affiliate link is used. But the safest thing to use it to create a redirection page or script on your site that will use the affiliate link when forwarding the visitor to the site.
It’s too bad, because the target site doesn’t get much advantage with the affiliate links when this is done. But then, we don’t really want anyone to know about LinkWorth unless WE tell them…!
wow! thanks man for this info, useful and of course more money in my pocket!
thats exactly what I said in my post!
Yeah, I have never really understood that about people - and 99% of them are fellow bloggers/webmasters! - I mean, you are obviously trying to build a downstream, but so what? It doesn’t hurt them in the least and if the program is good enough for them to be interested in, then why knock you out of a little extra dough… you know, seeing as how you were the one who turned them on to the whole thing to begin with!
But most of them do remove the affiliate link and go directly to the site. Then - to throw a little salt on the wounds - they list *their* affiliate link all over every other site!
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