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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March 18th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Wow, thanks for the tip again, Nate. I love it when I find all this “dirty” secrets exposed. Keep us posted with some other tips and tricks to work the system
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March 18th, 2008 at 1:24 am
I’ve just Stumbled your blog, apparently I was the first to “discover” it there
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March 18th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Good thinking. If you want the page to redirect instantly and not wait the 5 seconds, put a zero before the url. { content=”0;url= someurl” }
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March 18th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Thanks, Anca. I appreciate that and will keep giving you guys the secrets you need to know!
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March 18th, 2008 at 6:20 am
Good point, Jimi. not really sure how that works because for the demo I had it set at 1 and it goes instantly.
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March 18th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Your site is booming man, 229 readers! Thats awesome. I have 1. LAME. Anyways, is my site still f’d in IE? Let me know.
By the way, im gonna look into shareasale, under your link.
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Jimi D reply on March 19, 2008:
The middle section floats to the bottom in IE6. Check the width size, the border probably throws it off a pixel or two making it two wide to fit.
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chandler reply on March 19, 2008:
It looks fine in every IE i view it in.
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March 18th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Thanks, Chandler. I have been thrilled so far and will be giving you guys more updates on what I am doing. Your site is fixed in my browser….I’ll sign up for your feed and contest today.
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March 18th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I’m signed for you feed, Chandler. Nate, I saw the impressive no. of readers! Gimmes some!!!
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Nate reply on March 18, 2008:
Hey…I signed up for entrecard….I’m scheming on something.
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chandler reply on March 19, 2008:
I got entrecard. Still no subscribers. Thanks anca thought. You my girl.
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March 18th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Ooohooo! I see it
Wanted to drop you mine, but I don’t see the “drop” button yet. Howcome you’ve done it?
And what are you scheming on? You got me all curious now…
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Always scheming….i’ll let you know soon!
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Chandler…I’m toasting a beer to you: Here’s to beer,
Here’s to cheer,
Here’s to Chandler!
I’m struggling too, I know how it feels
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:29 am
You’re not struggling…you are growing slowly…..it will grow if you keep writing about what you are passionate about and learn to work in the “gray erea”. I need to do a motivational post for you guys!
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Anca reply on March 19, 2008:
Nate, you’re so nice! Yes, we are growing slowly. Any progress is good, I’m not expecting tons of traffic falling from the ceiling. I enjoy very much what I do, and I’m not about to stop. I’m just getting started. Still, a motivational post would not hurt
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
I’ll have something good for you tomorrow or the next day. I’m doing an interview with a tireless promoter that can give you guys/girls another perspective.
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Anca reply on March 19, 2008:
That should be a good one. OK Nate, looking forward to reading it. BTW, that Vegas story with the midget sounds so interesting. You should send it to me
March 19th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Have you ever tried GoCodes Plugin for WordPress? It does the same thing as WP Affiliate, except for free.
I’ve been playing with it on my blog, but for some reason the .htaccess is being retarded. I think it may be clashing with the .htaccess on the root domain, but I haven’t had the time to test my theory.
Food for thought.
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
Haven’t heard of it…what exactly does it do? I can’t do anything with .htaccess because I use Yahoo hosting. That’s why I have to have that “index.php” in the middle of my permalinks.
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Jotun reply on March 20, 2008:
I see. That’s a shame. I’m going to be setting up a WP blog for my brother on Yahoo hosting this weekend, so now I know it’s going to be a little goofy.
The GoCodes plugin takes a set of words and a hyperlink you define, and automatically rewrites your pages while hiding your affiliate url. For instance, you could set it so that every time you write Yahoo it would change it toYahoo, and when people mouse over the link, all they’d see was http://www.yourblog.com/go.php?=1
If I can get it working, it’s a far cry more time efficient than creating a separate page to do the redirect.
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Nate reply on March 20, 2008:
It’s definately a little squirrely to install it on yahoo. Definately don’t want to use their one click install. I wrote a post on it recently that you may want to check out - http://natespost.com/index.php/install-wordpress-on-yahoo-server/
March 21st, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Cool. I just signed up with Shareasale now. Hope it performs well. I liked the readable TOS.
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Nate reply on March 21, 2008:
Great. They’re a good comapany….remember to refer them as one of your merchants….you get $1 for every signup!
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Luke reply on March 22, 2008:
Sweet! I hope you got $1 for my signup. I didn’t have Javascript enabled at first, but the cookie should have gone through regardless.
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March 22nd, 2008 at 6:59 am
Yep, I did! Thanks! Sat. I’ll have a post about affiliate “warm up” pages which I’m going to build.
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