by Mark E. Mason on May 30, 2008
On Monday I wrote about several reasons to cloak links. Basically, I argued that cloaking links for the right reasons (managing link destinations and click tracking) meant that link cloaking was a great idea.
Of course, the idea that link cloaking is useful is supported by the number of link cloaking software solutions out there. While you can certainly go out and purchase a link cloaking solution, you can do it for free. In this article, I show you how to cloak your links for free.
How Cloak Links
Basically, the trick to link cloaking is to use your .htaccess file to redirect links targeted at a special subdirectory to a simple php program. That php program parses the link text to grab a keyword, and redirects the link based on that. For example, in the link "http://www.masonworld.com/recommends/google", the word "recommends" represents the special subdirectory and the word google is the keyword that will determine the actual destination link.
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by Mark E. Mason on May 26, 2008
I hear a lot of debate in the internet marketing community about whether or not to cloak links. Usually, the discussion about cloaking links is motivated by discussions of commission theft and other issues. Often, the people that are talking to you about commission theft are also trying to sell you some link cloaking solution, and increased revenue by decreased commission theft is one selling point they use to separate you from your $47 (a $997 value, of course).
In my next post, I am going to tell you how to cloak links for free. In this post, will cover the basics of how and why to cloak your links.
What is Link Cloaking?
If you are new to internet marketing, you might not even know what link cloaking is. For the purpose of this article, link cloaking is any technique you use to link to something that obscures the real destination link. For example, I can link to my favorite search engine. As you can see, the link is to "http://www.masonworld.com/recommends/search" and lands you at "http://www.google.com." The link to Google is "cloaked." You don't know where you are headed until you click on it. Read the Full Article →
