MaskingIn my last post, I discussed how to include outbound links in your landing page to boost relevancy. Today I would like to talk about how to mask your affiliate links.

What is masking links?

Masking links is just a simple way to hide your affiliate link and make the link look more natural in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. Take the Adwatcher banner up top for example, instead of displaying this link

http://www.adwatcher.com/affiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=615

I use a simple redirect and display my own link

http://www.ppcfool.com/advert/adwatcher.php

If you have your own product or service, there is really no need to do this, but if your an affiliate, most of the time the tracking links they give are long and ugly. It is very easy to do and takes little time, so I see it as only helping your landing page user-experience.

Redirecting Links

I prefer a simple redirect. Just go to your control panel and their should be a redirect icon, in cPanel it is under domains and says Redirects . Just click on the icon and fill out your link and the affiliate link and voila, your done! Simple and painless. For you bloggers out there, there is a nifty little plugin call Redirection that makes it easy to manage all your redirects and even gives you a log and count.

Javascript masking

Another way to do this is to use javascript to change the window bar status to what you want. The code is given below in javascript.

Meta Refresh

This is another way to redirect users to a given page after X number of seconds. Here is the code:

Just change the X to the number of seconds you want to wait before refreshing and change out the target.com to your desired destination.

Hope this helps in some way. I know I’m not the authority on this subject and programming is not my strength, so if any of you techie guys see something wrong just let me know :)

Love to hear your thoughts on this!