Would you like to hide affiliate links on your WordPress site? Are you unsure what the term “link cloaking” means? In this article, we will define link cloaking and show you how to cloak affiliate links in WordPress.
What is Link Cloaking and when do you need it?
Link cloaking is a method of converting long affiliate links into shorter, more branded links.
Affiliate links are frequently lengthy, difficult to remember, and display your affiliate username or ID in the following format:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/products/? product id=123&affiliate=123
Link cloaking allows you to convert these long, ugly links into branded URLs like these:
http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname
As a base URL, you can use anything. Yourblogmaster uses refer in our cloaked links. Some other popular URL bases are out, go, recommends, and so on.
If you make money by using affiliate links in your blogs, you should cloak your links. Several site owners cloak links in order to effectively manage their affiliate links.
Link cloaking allows you to create simple URLs for your outgoing affiliate links. It can also help you add an extra layer of click tracking to ensure you get paid for every sale you refer to.
You can also use link cloaking to protect your affiliate links from being hijacked. Finally, cloaked links allow users to easily handle your affiliate links from your WordPress admin interface.
The Best Way to Hide Affiliate Links in WordPress
Because affiliate marketing is a significant source of income for many bloggers, there are numerous WordPress plugins available that enable you to cloak your affiliate links and manage them easily.
We’ve chosen some of the best WordPress link cloaking plugins for you.
You can use any of these plugins to easily add and cloak your affiliate links in WordPress for maximum benefit.
1. ThirstyAffiliates.com
ThirstyAffiliates is a great WordPress affiliate link manager and link cloaking plugin. It enables you to easily add and manage your affiliate links in WordPress from a single dashboard.
Using the buttons on the post editor screen, you can insert affiliate links into any WordPress post or page.
Another useful feature is the ability to automatically replace specific keywords with affiliate links. Aside from that, you can choose the base URL, have links automatically nofollowed, A/B test your offers, geo-target your offers, get stats, and much more.
2. Beautiful Link Lite
Pretty Link Lite is yet another link cloaking plugin for WordPress. It makes it simple to manage your affiliate links. You can automatically add the nofollow tag to affiliate links, shorten them, and properly redirect them.
Pretty Link Lite also makes it easier for analytics to remove older hits from your database. This ensures that these hit logs do not take up too much space in your database or backup files.
3. Simple Affiliate Links
Easy Affiliate Links is a link cloaking plugin for affiliate marketers that is simple to use. It lets you cloak links, add and manage affiliate links all from a single dashboard.
Basically, it has all of the features you’d expect from a link management plugin, but with a more appealing and user-friendly interface.
4. WP Wizard Cloak 4
WP Wizard Cloak is yet another affiliate link management plugin for WordPress. It has all of the bells and whistles you’d expect from an affiliate link management tool.
It offers URL shortening and link cloaking, as well as simple tools for adding and managing affiliate links in WordPress.
5. Auto Replace Links
Links Auto Replacer differs from the majority of the other plugins on this list. Its main purpose, as the name implies, is to automatically add links for specific keywords. You can manage your links and add new links in the same way that you would with any other link management plugin.
6. Affiliate Links for WooCommerce Cloak
The WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links plugin, as the name suggests, is designed for eCommerce sites built on the WooCommerce platform.
This plugin automatically hides all external links on a WooCommerce site. You can select a URL slug by going to the Settings » Permalinks page. You can also change the type of redirect. But that’s all there is to it; because this plugin isn’t a link manager, you can’t use it to add or manage affiliate links.
7. Affiliate Link Manager
When it comes to link cloaking, the Affiliate Link Manager plugin takes a unique approach. It does not include a URL base, as do the majority of the other plugins on the list. Instead, it lets you use a keyword as the cloaked link’s URL slug. It is very limited in terms of features, but it does the job. It also provides some basic statistics for the views of your cloaked links.
We hope this article was useful in teaching you how to cloak links on your WordPress site.
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