Section 2: Affiliate Link Cloaking
What is cloaking and how does cloaking work?
Below is the ‘official’ definition of web page cloaking:
Web page cloaking is the act of showing different content to different visitors based on some criterion, such as whether they are a search engine spider, or whether they are located in a particular country.
A cloaking program/script will look at a number of available pieces of information to determine the identity of a visitor: the IP address, the User-Agent string of the browser, the referring URL, all of which are contained in the HTTP headers of the request for the web page. The script will make a decision based on this information and serve the appropriate content to the visitor.
Cloaking is often considered as a “black hat” search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.
For SEO purposes, cloaking is done to serve optimized versions of web pages to search engine spiders and hide that optimized version from human visitors. Although I will show you an example of this kind of cloaking in this guide later on, it is not the kind of cloaking I will concentrate on here.
The types of sites that successfully cloak for SEO purposes fall into a couple of categories:
• First, you have those who are targeting a broad range of “long tail” keywords, typically affiliate marketers and so on. They can use various cloaking software packages to easily create thousands of optimized pages which can rank well. Here, quantity is the key.
• Next, you have those with websites that are difficult for search engines to index. Some people with Flash-based websites want to present search engine spiders with text versions of their sites that can be indexed, while still delivering the Flash version to human visitors to the same URL.
Definition of affiliate link cloaking
Affiliate link cloaking is a technique that is being used to help stop affiliate link hijacking and affiliate link bypassing by ‘hiding’ or more correctly, ‘obfuscating’ affiliate links.
This is done to simply hide the affiliate’s code, or in more recent cases, to sneakily attach the vendor’s cookie to the visitor. This kind of cloaking is also better known as ‘Cookie stuffing’
Affiliate link bypassing refers to someone just removing your affiliate link to go directly unto the selling site. For example, suppose that you noted a book on my site and took the link to Amazon.com to check it out. Once there, you decide to buy the book, but instead of just buying it based on my link, you decide that you don’t want me to get a commission, so you leave Amazon, go back in and once there, search for and buy the book. When you do that, you have bypassed my affiliate link and I do not get a commission.
Affiliate link hijacking also refers to someone using their own affiliate link to buy a product. For example, suppose that you noted a book on my site and took the link to Amazon to check it out. Once there, you decide to buy the book, but instead of just buying it based on my link, you copy the information of the URL and then substitute your own affiliate link. Then you use that new link to go and buy the book. When you do that, I do not get a commission, but you do.
By hiding or “cloaking” the affiliate link one can prevent both of these.
Just to be clear, this guide is focused on Affiliate Link Cloaking.
Risks of cloaking
Many search engines discourage the practice of cloaking. They threaten to penalize or ban those caught using cloaking techniques, so it is wise to plan a cloaking campaign carefully. I tell webmasters that if they are going to cloak, they should set up separate domains from their primary website and host the cloaked pages on those domains. That way, if their cloaked pages are penalized or banned, it will not affect their primary website.
Also note that some affiliate programs do not allow these affiliate cloaking methods. As always, it is your responsibility to make sure that your chosen cloaking method is allowed, before using it with the intended affiliate program.
WARNING: Do not use this knowledge for Cookie stuffing, as it is considered illegal and in most cases against TOS of your vendor or network. (Check this or this if you have any doubts) .