Hide That Affiliate ID In Your Link

Posted in How To, Optimize And Monetize, WebMaster by DB

If you haven’t done it yet then you are in all probability leaving money on the table especially for your blog’s focus is predominantly on affiliate income. Having your affiliate id as part of your URL is a complete turn off for many readers. Read my previous posts about niche user behavior and also about how your blog or web site url should be structured. Many bloggers have caught on and are using either html or php redirects to mask their affiliate ids. But there is more you can do. Read on

The whole process is quite simple to setup and will probably take a few minutes of your time each time you add a new affiliate. Let me walk you through the steps.

  1. First, add the following snippet of code ( highlighted in red ) into every affiliate link you have, yes, inside the anchor tag itself.

    onmouseover=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”

    Now our smart internet user ( or so he thinks ) comes along, finds a link on your blog or website that interests him, he as usual hovers over the link and … hey, wait a minute, where did the link go? Sweet huh!!! This simple addition alone should suffice but unfortunately this only works with browsers that have JavaScript turned on which by the way is a very large percentage.

  2. So we then turn our attention to that small percentage who for some reason have turned off scripting (few more hoops to jump through) Create a separate folder under your domain root. Name it intelligently, call it “html” or something. A lot of bloggers these days use “go” like it’s some kind of standard or something. Well guys, the ”internat savvy” users have caught on and can spot an affiliate link the minute they see “/go/“ in the link.
  3. Now if you really want to go the full monty, go ahead and create a separate folder inside the “html” folder for each and every affiliate you deal with. Why? So that you can point your link to the affiliate folder and not the file name itself. Which one do you think looks better? an url ending with “SiteName.com/html/SEOBook/“ or “SiteName.com/html/SEOBook.php“
    Personally I prefer the former but then again I have my reasons.
  4. Next, place the redirect script or html page and call it index.html or index.php within the affiliate directory “/html/SEOBook/” if you are following the first approach ( a separate folder for every affiliate) or else directly under the “html” folder and name it accordingly (SEOBook.php from our example above)
  5. Finally update your robots.txt file to tell all the search engines to lay off the “html” folder and any of it’s contents.

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /html/

Do the above steps and you are done lining up all your ducks in a row. Let me know if your conversions take a turn for the better.

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2 Responses

  1. Wayne Says:
    March 14th, 2008 at 9:02 pm

    That’s a tough call because “web savvy” people are going to know it’s an affiliate link pretty much no matter what we do. I prefer using a redirect, because it kind of freaks me out (personally) when I don’t see anything for a link, who know where you’re going. But I guess the same could be said on any redirect.

    The question is, why would people web-savvy or otherwise NOT use an affiliate link? It’s not costing them any extra! I don’t mind, only because of Karma!

    People avoid using an affiliate link, but I’m sure they want or expect people to click on their affiliate links.

  2. DB Says:
    March 25th, 2008 at 9:21 pm

    You are absolutely correct there Wayne, people avoid clicking on affiliate links but expect the rest of the world to click on theirs.

    Agin it goes to show that it’s important to identify your niche and qualify your niche. If your niche targets a lot of web savvy readers then your affiliate earnings will be conisderably less compared to a non web savvy reader niche.

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