| Retaining Page Rank while Cloaking Affiliate Links |
Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic
There is no need to give away valuable Page Rank to
affiliate programs. You signed up to make money, not to
increase their search engine rankings.
Most Internet Marketers today add affiliate links to their
sites in order to generate additional revenue which helps
offset the cost of running the site.
It has now become necessary to cloak affiliate links
because some web savvy surfers seem to have a sour taste
in their mouth at the thought of some webmaster making
money as a result of their purchase.
Cloaking
There is a number of ways to cloak affiliate links. The
most popular include displaying affiliate pages in an
encrypted frame and the very simple "mouse-over" technique.
While displaying affiliate sales pages in a frame is a good
way to cloak the link, it is not reliable because some,
(not all) affiliate programs cannot track correctly if the
affiliate URL is displayed in a frame.
The mouse-over technique will display a URL of your choice
so that the affiliate URL is hidden. This too in not
reliable because the right mouse menu can reveal the real
URL in an instant. This technique will also drain your
valuable Page-Rank (PR) because the link points directly to
the affiliate sales page.
Not cloaking your affiliate links will also drain your PR
and reduce your click-through rates. So because it has
become necessary to cloak affiliate links, I have decided
that I may as well keep all the PR at the same time.
Another way.
The redirection page is no secret but still many Internet
Marketers do not set this up and yet it involves about the
same amount of effort as cloaking the link into an
encrypted frame.
There is a couple of places Online where you can create a
redirect page instantly for free and you need not upload
the page to your own site. This is an excellent way to
cloak links within the body of emails but if you use this
on your web pages, it will still drain your PR. It will
pass the PR along to the redirection service.
http://www.compacturl.com and http://www.tinyurl.com are
two sites that I know of that provide this free service.
How to create your OWN redirection page and keep all the PR!
1. Create a new HTML document.
2. Add the following line of code to the "head" of the
document:
[meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
url=http//www.youraffiliateURL?yourIDnumber"]
3. Replace "http//www.youraffiliateURL?yourIDnumber" with
your affiliate URL and replace ][ with ><
4. Name the page to reflect the affiliate program and
upload this page to your site and point that particular
affiliate link to this page.
If you have joined a number of affiliate programs, you
might like to create a new directory and add all these
redirection pages to this new directory.
I have set this system up at my site and then one day
discovered that some of these pages had a Page Rank of 3 or
4 with no outbound links. This is a waste. So now I have
added a link back to my home page on these pages. This now
serves to direct all my valuable PR to pages that I choose.
I do this with all outbound affiliate links.
Benefits
1. The Affiliate Link is not displayed.
2. Keep all the PR.
3. Target different keywords with the outbound links.
More about how tinyURL.com came into being:
http://tinyurl.com/yuq6b
Here's a 100% free for ever HTML editor - 1st Page 2000:
http://www.evrsoft.com/download.shtml
More info about how Page Rank works here:
http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
To discover how much Page Rank a particular page is, you'll
need the Google Toolbar: http://toolbar.google.com/
About the Author:
The author, Ed Zivkovic is a self taught webmaster. His
website contains articles with all sorts of tips for work
at home webmasters. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com
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