Using regular affiliate links has several drawbacks, and being able to cloak the links is something you must have, showing huge and ugly affiliate URLs will lower your conversion rate and seems quite unprofessional. Being able to transform your affiliate links into something prettier basic to every affiliate toolbox.

Why cloak URLs?

URL Size

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of affiliate links is their huge size, usually It’s the product You’re promoting plus your tracking code, making It really big, making It shorter will help You in several ways, including:

• It’s easer to memorize
• It doesn’t break on emails
• It looks a lot more professional

Trust

Having an URL inside your domain, that’s smaller and clearer, gives everybody a lot more trust, remember that We want them to buy something, give their data to someone, and trust is basic in this kind of relationship.

Search Engine Rules

Search engines, especially Google, doesn’t like links to places not related to your pages, It can really hurt your rankings. It’s a lot easer to simple ad a base category to WP-Affiliates and then block search engines’ robots for the entire path.

I’ve created a base category recommends, where I intend to put all my affiliate links under, so It’s very simple to ad a Disallow: /recommends to my robots.txt and, simply, don’t care to nofollow all my affiliate links.

Using WP-Affiliates

WP-Affiliates is a Wordpress plugin that helps you to cloak your links in a very professional way, and best of all, completely free. You can download WP-Affiliates from Wordpress plugin repository, and install It as any other wordpress plugin.

Something really strange for me is that the only place You can create an affiliate link is the posting screen, although the plugin creates an admin panel. Actually the admin panel is useful to ad Commission Junction’s affiliate ID and to track clicking statistics.

WP Affiliates

• Category name is the base category where your affiliate links will be in, in my case, recommends. You can create as many base categories as you want, but I strongly recommend using just one.
• Links is your affiliate link, the real one.
• Anchor text, should be the text displayed when You click to send the link to your post, and It also defines the permalink of your affiliate link, using the same filters used by Wordpress to create a post URL.