Affiliate Link Cloaking for WordPress

Its actually very easy to cloak links without needing a plugin, sure a plugin may take a couple of less steps, but it can also cost you a few bucks too if you want to do a real cloak. Why is that you ask? WordPress.org will not allow link cloaking plugins, so the developers put up a version that does a 307 re-direct. The problem with a 307 re-direct is that it is not actually cloaked.

To cloak to the degree that search engines cannot read the destination (and penalize for being a ‘thin affiliate site’), is to do either a meta refresh, or a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file.

I prefer much prefer working with .htaccess, so I will share that method. I should also mention this method will work for any apache based web application and not only WordPress.

If you don’t already have a .htaccess file in the root (base folder) of your site, then open a text file and place your cloaked URL and then the destination as follows

If there is already a .htaccess present then simply add the extra line as a new addition.

You can add as many lines of redirects as you like.

Now all you need to do is add the first value to the end of the URL.

For example

That’s it!

Category: SEO