Redirecting or Cloaking Affiliate Links

There are several methods of Redirecting or Cloaking Affiliate Links and this article while not being comprehensive does attempt to address some of the more common ones.

Method 1 Using Meta Refresh

Create a file such as redirect.html and include in the header the line below replacing youraffiliatelink.com with the link you require, upload to your root directory.

meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234″

Optionally you can also include a title tag.

Call up the redirect with this link http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.html

The main disadvantage of this method is you need a separate file for every redirect.

Method 2 Using PHP

Create a file for example redirect.php and upload to your root directory

php

$links = array(
“link1″ => “http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234″,
);
header(“Location:”.$links[$_GET['site']]);
exit;

?

You can replace link1 & http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234 with whatever you want. You may also add as many other affiliate links below this one as you want.

Call up this redirect using this link http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?site=link1

Method 3 Using .htaccess

My personal favorite method for redirection is using a .htaccess file.

Place the following in your .htaccess file and upload to the root directory

Redirect 301 /link1 http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234

You may add other links below the first as required

To call up this redirect use the following syntax

http://www.yoursite.com/link1