Why Cloak Your Affiliate Links?

It’s a bit of a hot topic among affiliate marketers that they need to protect their commissions by cloaking them. There is a virtual wave of paranoia about rogue affiliates stealing their commissions. Let’s look at the possibilities of how this can be done, and then we can decide whether cloaking is the way to go.

The basic way that an affiliate link can theoretically get stolen is by essentially hacking the page that it’s on and changing the code in the link so that it pays the thief, and not the owner of the link. There are a few problems with this in general.

First, the thief would have to know what an affiliate link is, and what it does. That’s not terribly hard to figure out; information abounds on the Web about affiliate programs. But the people who would know to look for the information are few and far between, compared with the average user.

Secondly, they would have to know how to hack your page and find your link code. Sure, your page can be hacked, as pages get hacked pretty regularly. They can be scraped for content, but it takes some skill and tools to do that. That also implies a rare breed of individual.

Finally, what are they going to replace your affiliate ID with? That is, your affiliate ID is how the link gets credited to you, and you get paid. If they don’t have one of their own to replace it with, then it follows that they wouldn’t get paid your commissions.

The bottom line of that is that they would have to be an affiliate on the same project that you’re working. I’m willing to bet that on most campaigns, even the large scale ones, there would probably be only one person on staff that could do it.

There are other ways to catch a thief. Many affiliate programs have tracking software that you can use to see where your traffic is going. There are also programs that you can buy to do this. If you keep track of this, you can catch them early on.

If absolutely nothing else, you can check your affiliate ID in the code when you do updates to your site. If you know it by heart, or if you have it on a Post It note on your screen, you can find out in 2 seconds if someone ganked your affiliate link.

Now, let’s compare all that to the possibilities of cloaking. First of all, yes, you wouldn’t have to worry at all about someone stealing your link. Well, at least the probability is negligible. But then, from what I just said, isn’t it already? Besides, if they REALLY want your link, they will find a way to get it.

Now, what if you cloak your affiliate link—what does Google think of that? In the webmaster guidelines, it specifically says:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

I don’t know what that says to you, but I know what that says to me.