Hide Affliliate Links - How To
Personally, I don’t hide affiliate links because this blog is about, well… making money. In a recent post I explained that I had signed up for shareasale, a 3rd party affiliate program. I make money not only by referring people to merchants within their network but by recommending shareasale itself. You can scroll across the links and see the tracking code in the bottom of your browser, plain as day… I’m making money. There are, however, a couple of reasons you might consider hiding your affiliate links and not feel guilty about it.
- Google. Yeah, those guys. Especially if your blog is relatively new and doesn’t have a lot of content, having a number of affiliate links can raise a red flag with google. Warranted or not, google could very well perceive your blog as nothing but an affiliate marketing scheme. Good luck with your search engine traffic at that point.
- Long url’s scare people. EVERYONE, including your grandmother that just set up internet access to prowl the dating sites, looks at the bottom of the browser before they click a link. So you have devoted an entire post to building up a product and letting someone know how much better their life would be with it and boom…you give the link. Your reader points his mouse, reads the bottom and it may as well say http://www.badproduct.com/?affiliate=thisjackassistryingtoscrewme If you think it’s dishonest to hide the tracking code, it could mean that you’re promoting something you don’t believe in anyway.
So how to get rid of it? Link to an internal page on your site and redirect that page using your affiliate code. As an example, I did this with shareasale. Create an html page in your root directory and name it product.html, where product is what you are trying to sell. That page should consist of the following -
<html>
<head>
<title>Product Name</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”your affiliate link“;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=your affiliate link“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does not load after 5 seconds,
<a href=”your affiliate link“>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
Now link to that page within your site instead of inserting your affiliate code directly. The “noindex,nofollow” tags keep google from looking at the page or following the link and keeps the affiliate link “clean” in your post. To see the difference from the readers’ perspective, scroll over the link in the first paragraph and compare to the clean version - shareasale
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