You’ve got a landing page all ready to go, and it has your affiliate hoplink embedded in it in various places. Most savvy web surfers know how to spot a hoplink (you do too, don’t you?) so this article shows you several ways you can hide your hoplink which will hopefully increase the clickthroughs to the Clickbank sales page. The methods that I will describe are using meta refresh, redirecting using .htaccess, redirecting using PHP/ASP, link shrinkers and finally paid cloaking services.
Hiding your hoplink using meta refresh is outlined on Clickbank’s own site, and it involves creating a target page or index page on a site that has the following code in the
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; URL=http://u235media.affpayload.hop.clickbank.net">
</head>
What this does is tells the user’s browser that the content for this page has been temporarily moved to a new location (your hoplink) and to load that URL after a delay of one second. You put this in a separate page called something like “affiliatepayload-checkitout.html”. This is a very simple method that doesn’t require any programming or real technical knowledge, but it has been abused by spammers (like the meta keyword tag) and is mildly dubious. I personally would not use it.
If your web hosting provider is using Apache, you can use a .htaccess file to write mod_rewrite rules that will hide your hoplink by redirecting incoming requests to a target page or site. We will use a temporary redirect (HTTP 302) to our hoplink whenever a request comes in to our target page. It would look like this if we wanted to redirect all requests to “visitaffpayload.html”:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^visitaffpayload.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://u235media.affpayload.hop.clickbank.net/ [L,R=302]
The first line turns on the rewrite engine, the second line says “if the user is requesting the page visitaffpayload.html then execute the redirect below.” The RewriteRule line tells Apache that it should use a “Temporarily Moved” redirect to hide the hoplink. This method is more technically demanding than the meta refresh, and looks a little less spammy to search engines. Unfortunately rewrite rules are kind of a black art, and debugging them (fixing them when they’re broken) can be a challenge even for seasoned hackers.
If you’re comfortable getting a little more technical you can use PHP or ASP to deliver the redirect with a couple lines of code. Again, you create a page that you link to that performs the redirect. Here’s the same code in PHP and ASP:
<?php header( "HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily" ); header( "Location: http://u235media.affpayload.hop.clickbank.net" ); ?> <% ' Temporary redirection Response.Status = "302 Moved Temporarily" Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://u235media.affpayload.hop.clickbank.net/" Response.End %>
Some people are intimidated by writing a few lines of code, but debugging is much simpler than the .htaccess method, since you can look at the error logs to see if something is broken.
Services of a site like tinyurl.com can be used to obfuscate your hoplink. Go to tinyurl.com, type in your hoplink URL and out pops a new URL (to tinyurl.com) with some gobbldigook on the end. Link to this. These services essentially do the above redirection for you, but look super spammy to engines and users. I personally use these services for sending links in email or over MSN when copy-pasting just isn’t working, and never for affiliate hoplinks. To each their own.
A last (and least recommended) solution is a paid cloaking service. Again, these are simply sites which obfuscate your URL like tinyurl. I don’t use them as I don’t want to take a risk that a service would start cloaking for … less repuatable … *wink* industries and search engine and browser companies may decide to tar all links with the same brush. For me, it’s just not worth the risk, and I have alternative (and free) options at my disposal.
Hiding a hoplink is a good thing to do with more marketing-savvy web surfers these days (not to mention other affiliates) and it can have some SEO benefit by not linking directly to another site.
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