How to Hide Affiliate Links

These are essentially a few ways to make it look like you are not an affiliate to the average visitor.

If you ask a person on the street, if they know what affiliate marketing is, they will most likely have no idea what you are talking about.

However, your links are likely to look strange in their browser’s status bar when they hover over them.  For example, a MarketLeverage link would look something like this:

http://bargainscentralweb.com/a.php?a=*&b=*&d=0&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4766&s1=*

If your user hesitates before they click (or is just afraid of being spun around — like me 😉 ), they may look at their browser’s status bar just to be safe.  BargainsCentralWeb.com to them is going to look strange and give them second thoughts.

Solution 1: PHP redirect

Standard redirect

If you have a free credit report landing page, you may be likely to make a page like:

get-it-now.php

<?php header(‘Location: http://bargainscentralweb.com/a.php?a=*&b=*&d=0&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4766&s1=*’); ?>

That page would then redirect to the actual merchant’s page (as well as your tracking system – perhaps).  This is perfectly fine in most cases.

Review page redirect

In some cases you want to appear as if you are linking directly to the merchant.  “get-it-now.php” is going to look awkward in this case.  An appropriate URL would look like one of the two, below:

http://shockmarketer.com/redirect/www.credit-report.com

http://shockmarketer.com/redirect.php?go=www.credit-report.com

The first URL would require a little .htaccess magic 🙂 .  This would also be fine in most cases, but we can still do better.

Solution 2: Status bar manipulation

You can force window.status to display whatever text you’d like; in this case we’d show the merchant’s URL.  This technique isn’t perfect, but it will appear well enough for most of our users.  If you are using FireFox, this will not work, but it does in the versions of Internet Explorer that I’ve tested:

<a href=”redirect.php” OnMouseover=”window.status=’http://www.creditreport.com’;return true;” OnMouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;”>credit report.com</a>

Solution 3: Utilizing cookies

It is possible to stuff cookies in this instance, but that could get you banned from the merchant unless you have permission.  If you were to have permission, you could then just link to any page on the site (after passing the cookies).  This is by far one of easiest ways to not get spotted by the user.

There was one interesting thing that I spotted with MarketHealth* (a sponsor of ASW09 — and yes, that is an affiliate link).  They called this “Advanced Invisible Affiliate Links”.  They allow you to link directly to the site you want to promote, but you have to put a piece of JavaScript on your landing page.  As you can tell, this would make things a lot easier.

Conclusion

There is no perfect way to hide or make your affiliate links invisible, there are just some tactics that’ll work well much of the time.

If you think of any other ways, leave a comment with additional ideas.

*As for MarketHealth, I talked with them at their booth in Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West.  They carry a lot of mainstream health products and free trial products (i.e., acai berry, colon cleanse, etc.), but the terms and conditions are actually clear for the consumer (imagine that).  Commission on a customer is also lifetime.