link cloaking

Raining in Tokyo

by Mark E. Mason on August 17, 2008

I'm writing this in the United Airlines Red Carpet lounge in Narita airport near Tokyo.  It's 2AM Dallas time, but it is the middle of the day here in Japan.  I am waiting on my connection to another Asian country.  That will be my third airplane today and I have a bus ride to follow that.  I left my house in Dallas 20 hours ago and I have another 8 to go before I reach my hotel.  I am officially declaring that a long day (phew).

It's A Small, Small World

All is not lost, however.  I am chatting with Garry Conn via GTalk as I write this.  He is still up in the middle of the night generating content about how to make money online as usual.  It's funny, because with the internet, he has no reason to suspect that I am in Tokyo aside from the fact that I told him.  The technology is simply amazing.  The first thing I did when I got off the plane was to check on Michael Phelps.  Looks like he won his eighth Olympic Gold Medal while I was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.  Well, on this day, swimming meant something very good for him -- for me, not so much.  Needing to swim during a scheduled international flight over the pacific is never a good thing.  Luckily, no swimming for me today.

Working On The Road

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Cloaking Links: How To Cloak Links For Free

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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Cloaking Links: Why Bother

by Mark E. Mason 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, [...]

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