Cloaking affiliate links so they don’t look ugly is one reason to say yes to cloaking. Otherwise all sorts of gobbledgook appears somewhere on your browser screen – at the bottom left on the ones I checked just now but it seems to vary over time and from browser to browser.

Most people don’t consciously pay attention to these links but they do spot them out of the corner of their eye. You’ve probably seen stuff like this on Amazon at the end of a url: ref=s9_dnav_bw_ir01_z?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1434X93FTZJJNE43FEXH&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=467082527&pf_rd_i=77197031

Yikes!

Amazon kind-of need it but they could be neater about how they go about it.

Google have the same kind of tracking info but don’t display an ugly, long, link in your browser.

Which means that Google cloak links, so if you indulge in link cloaking you’re by no means alone.

But there’s a more important reason for cloaking affiliate links as well.

I just had it happen to me.

I promote a podcasting course on Udemy – it’s not a subject I know enough about to teach but some people I come into contact with are interested in podcasting (audio rather than video content) and it’s a course that teaches it well.

Up until now, Udemy had run their own affiliate program. So the affiliate links were in a certain format that they’d decided.

Then yesterday I got an email telling me that the current format of links would stop working in 16 days time.

Any click after that date wouldn’t generate a commission and longer term may or may not work at all.

So I went into WordPress, clicked on the link for the plugin WP Shorties and edited the one place that link was.

Job done.

If I wasn’t cloaking my links, I’d have to track down every place that affiliate link was displayed.

Several product download pages in my case.

But it could easily have been inside a PDF that had been distributed.

Unlike Kindle books, PDFs have no built-in update system.

So once they’re downloaded on your computer, that’s it.

If the link breaks or changes, anyone clicking on it will get an error.

You’d lose the commission.

And the reader would wonder what else was out of date or broken in the PDF and stand a high chance of giving up on clicking the links in it.

Of course, you have to know that an affiliate link has changed.

The plugin doesn’t perform any kind of checking for that – I’ve not come across one that does, which either means there’s no demand for the service or that it’s too complicated to program affordably.

For instance, the Udemy change wouldn’t break (at least not short term), it just won’t trigger a commission after 1st March.

Clickbank programs can get dropped or more to another affiliate platform without any notification. Or the URL can be allowed to lapse and – if there’s traffic still going to it – maybe turn into a junk site that exists on commission when people click adverts. So whilst a human would know the link was no longer valid, a checker program would struggle.

But so long as my site stays in existence, the links will be under my control.

So when I checked or got told, I could change the cloaked affiliate link and it would simply redirect to the new place.

A lot simpler than hoping I could track down and change all the uncloaked links.

So if you’ve been sitting on the fence on this one, I’d strongly suggest that you get some kind of link cloaking program or plugin. WP Shorties is the one I use, it’s reliable, regularly updated and free.

Adfiliate links are something that can be under your control and – more importantly – should be under your control.