Your Cloaked Link May be Hurting Your Page Ranking

Many affiliates ask about the nofollow attribute. They are afraid that adding cloaked affiliate links to their web pages will penalize them in the search engines. It is a valid concern because if your search engine rankings drop, your affiliate revenue will suffer.

Is cloaking your affiliate links is absolutely necessary to protect your online income? Will Google and other search engines penalize you because you link to an affiliate program? This is what we are going to discover in this article...

First, I wanted to say that if you don't cloak your affiliate links, you will still make money. While there are many discussions in online forums about this topic, don't worry too much about it.

The only markets concerned are the "Internet marketing" and make "money online niche". In other markets, web surfers will not notice the difference between your affiliate link and the direct link to the merchant's website.

You know, most of the people don't have a clue about AdSense, associate programs and Internet marketing.

Now, let see why you should cloak your links?

Obviously, doing this will help you to earn more money in the following situations:

In the "make money" niche, many of your visitors are savvy enough to buy your products via their own affiliate links. This happen often with clickbank, but like I said earlier, this will not happen in the weight loss niche for example.

The second reason is to prevent link bypassing. This one can happen in any niche market because many people don't like to click on these long affiliate links and prefer to type the url in their address bar.

This happens all the time, and the affiliate who spent time and money to get the visitor don't earn any money.

For the same reason, do not send a long and ugly link to your subscribers by email. Many of your readers won't even bother to click, and worst, sometime, email filter will get rid of your email...

Let's talk about cloaking and search engine optimization now...

Search engines do not like associate websites because they see that they don't add any value to the Internet.

Knowing this, be sure that you add the "nofollow" attribute in your "a" tag. Like this, search engines won't follow this link.

Search engines like authority sites, and you need to show them that your website is an authority. If search engines discover that your site is a "pre-sell" website (the model used by affiliate marketers), they will not view it as an authority, and your rankings will suffer, so be careful.

Don't be afraid to add affiliate links to your web pages. Don't overdo it, and write high quality articles on your website, and you shouldn't have any problem.