In most cases, affiliate links are very easy to locate even for non-experienced website visitors. Most people don't like the idea that some other person will be paid a commission with their purchase or service subscription. Because of this, it is very reasonable to cloak our affiliate links. Search engine spiders are also enemies of such ugly looking long affiliate URLs with one or more parameters.

Google clearly states in their Thin Affiliate Websites explanation that they are negative about sites full of only affiliate links.

Thin affiliate sites: These sites collect pay-per-click (PPC) revenue by sending visitors to the sites of affiliate programs, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. These sites usually have no original content and may be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content.

So, the best approach is to blend cloaked affiliate links with original valuable content.

As an affiliate marketer, I will show you two of the best methods to cloak affiliate URLs.

This is the plugin I use for all my blogs. It is very simple to define new links. For example;

Normally, Chitika PPC Network affiliate link would look like the following :

http://chitika.com/publishers.php?refid=muratos

After I defined URL in Pretty Link management screen, it changes into

http://domainname.com/chitika

As you can see, it looks much better and natural now.

You can also prefer to use a structure with go statement hinting visitors that you just redirect to this site, innocently

http://domainname.com/go/chitika

Another nice feature is that the plugin also can count all redirections, thus the hits which masked affiliate links get from visitors.

You can get Pretty Link for Wordpress here.

Most experienced Internet users still would understand our efforts to hide affiliate link. Now, look at the following URL structure.

http://domainname.com/redirect.php?url=www.affiliate.com

So, where is the affiliate ID then?

Here, most users just will think that we just redirect to www.affiliate.com without any affiliate ID. If you think like this as well, unfortunately it is not as innocent as it looks like. We can easily embed an extra parameter of some aff_ID in redirect.php.

In conclusion, usage of the above affiliate cloaking system is the most effective one because it can deceive even the Internet geeks.

There is a common scenario happening to most affiliate marketers. We find a nice offer at cj.com (Commission Junction) and start building links and even websites, blogs dedicated to them. After some years, this affiliate can go out of business. Surely, we will not throw all the links to the garbage we had built already since they have traffic. What we need is to replace cloaked link with another one. If we didn't use cloaking and put all the links as they are, we would have to find and change all these links one by one. It is time consuming and still open to the errors. Now, all we need is just changing a line in our affiliate link cloak management plugin or system.

Use an affiliate cloaking system with hit count. You will see the benefits of masking links when your blog or blog network enlarges by time.