Home > Questions and Answers > General Questions

What is the best way to cloak affiliate links? (15)

10-06-2011 08:43 PM #1 affgal (Member)
What is the best way to cloak affiliate links?

Hi guys
I have a profitable campaign with some offer I'm running right now with media buying and I really don't want my cpa network to find out about where the conversions are coming from. I'm sure they will try to copy my campaign which is pretty easy to do . I run this campaign with direct linking and before I decide to scale it up, I would like to ask you guys what is the easiest way to cloak my traffic source so that my network will never know how I bring the conversions ?

Thanks!

10-06-2011 08:50 PM #2 shoent (Member)

use cloaking in prosper for the easiest way, do a double meta refresh for the safest way.

10-06-2011 09:08 PM #3 affgal (Member)

thanks mate, any chance you can give me a link to some information about it? I have never done this before so i'm pretty much clueless about this cloaking thing

10-06-2011 09:11 PM #4 shoent (Member)

wait are you direct linking from traffic source to network offer url, with out anything in the middle like prosper202 or cpvlab

10-06-2011 09:21 PM #5 affgal (Member)

yeah....that's the problem i want to solve

10-06-2011 10:03 PM #6 turtle (Member)

Here's how you do a DMR without the need for prosper... First create two separate files to save to your root of your server... We will call them index.php and index2.php.

File 1: index.php
[PHP]<?php
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://www.yoursite.com/index2.php\">";
?>[/PHP]

File 2: index2.php
[PHP]<?php
$referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if($referer == "")
{
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com\">";
}
else
{
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://www.yoursite.com\">";
}
?>[/PHP]

Simply upload both files to your root directory and send your traffic to the index.php file on your website. Sometimes browsers leak referrer info anyway... The second index file should help to prevent that by checking if the referrer is blank prior to redirecting.

10-06-2011 10:07 PM #7 shoent (Member)

ya so you are still going to have to edit your url in your traffic source and wait till it gets reapproved.

10-06-2011 10:08 PM #8 polarbacon (Moderator)

https>http...it will never show the ref....

10-06-2011 10:14 PM #9 affgal (Member)

thank you guys. if i use the plugin "pretty links" with wordpress , will it do the job as well in terms of cloaking the traffic source?

10-07-2011 01:25 AM #10 turtle (Member)

Although I'm not really familiar with "pretty links", at first glance it looks like it just masks your links... That won't change the referrer, it will only make your links look shorter.

10-07-2011 05:08 AM #11 affgal (Member)

ok so i installed prosper on my server and eventually i got a link looking something like this :

http://www.mysite.org/tracking202/re...id=111&t111kw=

is that what i was needed to achieve ? and by the way is it only me, or it really does take way too long for the site to load with the addition of prosper202 ?

10-07-2011 06:31 AM #12 a1m_ (Member)

Cloaking your links is very risky if you are trying to be certain that no referral data is based. For instance, doing meta refresh is time consuming, let alone doing it twice. Same thing for other strategies as well. The only method which works 99% of the time is http to https or https to http.

10-07-2011 07:26 AM #13 affgal (Member)

can you please elaborate on the http to https thing? i'm not really sure i understand what it means and how to do it

thanks!

10-07-2011 08:09 AM #14 alex_b (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by affgal View Post
can you please elaborate on the http to https thing? i'm not really sure i understand what it means and how to do it

thanks!
Get an SSL certificate (usually from your domain registrar, I prefer namecheap), install it and then, instead of direct-linking to the offer, you link to yourSSLdomain.com/out.php, and in out.php you have a simple redirect code to your offer link.

10-07-2011 02:56 PM #15 polarbacon (Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by a1m_ View Post
Cloaking your links is very risky if you are trying to be certain that no referral data is based. For instance, doing meta refresh is time consuming, let alone doing it twice. Same thing for other strategies as well. The only method which works 99% of the time is http to https or https to http.
its 100% of the time https>http as its not allowed by any browser.....its a pretty hard and fast rule....adpoted by all browsers....

there will be a new attribute in HTML5 which will instruct the user agent(browser) not to send the header......"attribute/value rel = "noreferrer"

but of course thats not fully adopted.....yet

Home > Questions and Answers > General Questions