6 Reasons for White Hat Link Cloaking: Don’t Leave Money on the Table

If you want to generalize, Link Cloaking or Link Masking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. Usually this technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. And that’s why Black Hat Link Cloaking is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. Just incase you wanted to know the difference between them, read through my “SEO Ethics: White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO” post.  Having said that, cloaking links in any Internet Marketing activity is important, especially if you promote lots of products. But its needs to White Hat cloaking. Today i will talk about 6 reasons to cloak you affiliate links as a blogger and in future how to do it.

Spam Complaints:
When a visitor clicks on an un-cloaked affiliate link, the affiliate’s link details will be displayed in the address bar. This serves to alert the visitor that they are not at the official website they believed they were being directed to.  And if a subscriber files a spam complaint with their ISP, the ISP could get the website shut down. So, to mitigate this issue, it is recommended for websites owners to use a link cloaking system to convert all direct affiliates link into a link with the domain name.
Example: Instead of link http://abcd.dot.com/aff3453 , you can have www.your-domain-name.com/product link.

Link Hijacking:
In the competitive internet marketing world it happens all the time and may or may not happen to you yet but probability is that it will happen. There are a lot of black hat way for the link hijackers who will simply substitute your affiliate ID with their own in the link, – stealing the commission at point of purchase. 

Conversion Rate:
Usually the merchants landing page or sales pages contain extra bonuses and newsletter subscriptions which may deviate customers away from buying and allows the merchant website to overwrite the affiliate’s link at the last minute. If you use an affiliate link cloaking service then you will be able to send you r subscribers to the specific product page resulting a high conversion rate.

Building Trust:
Often, a product that you are promoting at your website is withdrawn. And if you have used a direct affiliate link for that product then you will be sending all of your subscribers to something which doesn’t exist, losing your credibility. However, if you use a link cloaking system or service, then all you have to do is change that link for your destination page and you will be sending your subscribers to an alternate page.

Branding:
As you will be moving forward with your website, keep in mind that you also will be branding your website. By cloaking you affiliate links you will expedite your website’s brand building process. Once simplest way to perform this task is to format your link where your domain name stand out .
Example: http://www.Your-Website.com/Reviews/Product

Performance Tracking:
“We pay for our ignorance”, which is why as an internet marketer you need to be tracking you affiliate links click reports. You need to know how your keywords are working or you so that you can optimize them and make them more profitable. A decent link cloaking system will provide you with click tracking records. You can track your links click through rate, followed by conversion rate and you can also perform a lots of tests to optimize your profit.

Hopefully by now, you will have a decent idea about the importance about cloaking while blogging about other stuff. So get you cloaking script and start enjoying the benefits.

Filed Under: Blogging • Make Money Online