26 März 2008
How to Hide your Affiliate Links
Posted by Duckeldannys Money Blog under: General; Net News; Wordpress; seo .
To hide your Affiliate Links you can use some different WordPress Plugins like
I have tried these Plugins, but it don´t worked for me. I don´t know, but I`ve deleted the Plugins. Than, I have searched on Google for "Hide Affiliate Plugins" alternatives and yes, I´ve found better tricks to hide your Affiliate Links. The keyword is Redirect. Here are now some alternatives to Plugins:
Meta Refresh
While meta refreshes generally cause problems for search engines and seen as bad practice, the noindex,nofollow tells them not to index it or follow the link thus not creating such problems. The content is refreshed to the affiliate web page in 1 second, giving the bots time to see the noindex,nofollow tag and for your analytics code or other tracking programs to run.
This code should be placed within a text file then saved as affiliate.htm and uploaded to the /go/ directory. Whenever you want to link to the affiliate, just link to /go/affiliate.htm
<html>
<head>
<title>Affiliate</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://www.affiliate.com/?ref=123" />
</head>
<body>
<p>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br />If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href="http://www.affiliate.com/?ref=123">click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
PHP 301
The PHP 301 is pretty simple, it tells the server the page has moved to another location, then sends the page to Location:, which happens to be the affiliate page; it is done instantaneously. The problem though is that this does not allow you to track the page using JavaScript tracking scripts like Google Analytics.
To use the PHP 301, just save it as affiliate.htm and upload it to /go/affiliate.htm
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.affiliate.com/?ref=123");
exit();
.htaccess 301
Another simple implementation for affiliate redirects is the .htaccess 301 redirect. This code tells the server that /go/affiliate.htm should be redirected to affiliate.com/?ref=123. No extra files are needed, just upload this script and whenever you want to link to affiliate.com/?ref=123 just link to /go/affiliate.htm. If you know much about .htaccess you can create wildcards for affiliates, making a pretty cool/badass affiliate link system.
Redirect 301 /go/affiliate.htm http://www.affiliate.com/?ref=123
JavaScript redirect
The JavaScript redirect is similar to the meta refresh as you can run scripts before the code executes allowing you to track it. The code tells the browser that the page is located somewhere else and sends the browser there.
<script type="text/javascript">window.location="http://www.affiliate.com/?ref=123";</script>
In my opinion the best way to easy hide Affiliate Links is using HopURL.com
You type in the real Url like
http://chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=duckeldanny
and HopURL creates you a Link like this: http://hopurl.com/42188
4 Comments so far...
Crystal Says:
27 März 2008 at 00:01.
Thank you thank you and THANK YOU! I’ve been looking for this (very passively mind you) ever since seeing it on some well-known sites. This is definite a great script. I’m going to try the plugins first though.
Duckeldanny Says:
27 März 2008 at 00:11.
Thank you 
It´s nice to know that I could help you
If you like, you can rate this post 
Christine Says:
30 März 2008 at 22:42.
Hi,
I have just recently started using TinyUrl to cover my affiliate links.
I always thought that it was a paid service until I checked it out a couple of nights ago and found it was free.
Any experience using it?
Duckeldanny Says:
31 März 2008 at 00:17.
I have no experience with tinyurl. I think it is like hopurl.
But I think at tinyurl you don´t have a control panel to manage your links and the click stats, but it´s a great service too.
