How to Hide Affiliate Link

Hijacking Affiliate Links

When you sign up for an affiliate network, you will have an ID assigned to you. By placing this ID at the end of the product URL, you will have an affiliate link. Get people to go to your affiliate link and buy the product you are promoting and you will earn a cut of the profit. This system is used by most affiliate networks, such as ClickBank.

Nothing can go wrong with this it seems. Except that people are uncomfortable with others earning a commission off them when they purchase something. Therefore, they have resorted to removing your ID from the affiliate link so that any sales made are not credited to you. This is called affiliate link hijacking.

How do they hijack links? They come across an affiliate link on your website, realise that it contains an ID and decides that they do not want you to earn from them. They then copy your affiliate link to the Address Bar, remove the ID and click ‘Go’.

Your Affiliate Link:
http://buy-this-product.com/product.php?ref=yourID

…..after hijacking
http://buy-this-product.com

Now, there are no absolute solution on your part to prevent affiliate link hijacking. You will have to hope the affiliates you are promoting do something for you. They can redirect your affiliate link to their own domain so that others can never spot your affilaite ID.

Unfortunately, most affiliates do not bother to do something about link hijacking. That is when you have to protect your own profits. There are many ways to do this, but first, check that the affiliate network allows you to hide affiliate links.

.htaccess

This is for Linux servers only. .htaccess is a file located in the same folder as your homepage. You can create a new one if you don’t have it. Upload a .txt blank file to your folder and then rename it to “.htaccess”.
Add this to your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^ebook.php$
http://buy-this-product.com/product.php?ref=yourID [R]

This will redirect your webpage ebook.php to your affiliate website with your ID intact. They will not realise that ebook.php is an affiliate link since it contains no ID. You only need to edit 1 file in this method, but with many affiliate products, it can be hard to keep track.

PHPRedirect

Create a php file, such as ebook.php, and have this code inserted:

<? header(”Location: http://buy-this-product.com/product.php
?ref=yourID”); ?>

This is the same as the .htaccess method, except that you need to create a PHP file for each affiliate link.

HTML Redirect

Insert this in your HTML <HEAD> section:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;
url=http://buy-this-product.com/product.php?ref=yourID”>

This uses HTML redirect instead of PHP and works the same as PHP redirect. You need to create a PHP or HTML file for each affiliate link.

JavaScript Redirect

This method only works if the visitor enables JavaScript. Insert the following JavaScript code into the <BODY> section:

<a href=”http://www.affiliate.com/product.php”
onclick=”parent.location.href=?http://buy-this-product.com
/product.php?ref=yourID?;
return event.returnValue=false”>The Product</a>

robots.txt

If you are using the PHP, HTML or JavaScript redirect methods, place all the PHP or HTML files you create for your affiliate links into a single folder and use the robots.txt to prevent any search engine bots to crawl them. Insert the code below to your robots.txt file.

User-agent: * Disallow: /folder

The robots.txt file should be uploaded to the same folder as your homepage.

JavaScript mouseOver

This method only works if the visitor enables JavaScript. Use the following script for your anchor tag.

<a href=”http://buy-this-product.com/product.php?ref=yourID”
onmouseover=”this.href=’http://www.mydomain.com/ebook.php’;”
onclick=”this.href=’http://affiliate.com/product.php?ref=larry’;”>

This script makes the status bar of the browser show “mydomain.com/ebook.php” when the visitor hovers the mouse cursor over the anchor link. But when clicked on, the visitor will go to your affiliate link “buy-this-product.com/product.php?ref=yourID” instead.