Direct aff links..

[julian]

Whats the consensus on searchengine effect on having direct aff links on homepage to AWIN/CJ and the like.

Personally I like to hide the referring url from joe bloggs in case they think its dodgy with a redirect or even top a content page about the affiliate r.g. www.mysite.co.uk/awinmerchant etc

Upside is saves a lot of time just blasting raw aff links on sites though

Your thoughts.

 

[julian]

jesus I'm a sad bastard its August bank holiday.

 

[Blossom]

Are you nofollowing them? That's the most important thing.

 

[julian]

yes thanks, but I just wondered if people are bothering to mask the raw url or not or just a bit of a 2000 throw back.

Are you nofollowing them? That's the most important thing.

 

[Retired_Member38]

Personally I like to hide the referring url from joe bloggs in case they think its dodgy with a redirect or even top a content page about the affiliate r.g. www.mysite.co.uk/awinmerchant etc

There are other reasons to do it, but if you're doing it for that one along then its utterly pointless.

Anyone web savvy already understands that your /go/Amazon link is an affiliate link. Anyone not web savvy couldn't care less. You're fooling nobody.

 

[nick-harper]

You have more control when you do that sort of thing, you can track clicks at your end / add click references.

It also depends on how the affiliate link looks, it just looks a bit nicer sometimes with a shorter link.

 

[Adam H]

1. Masking allows some anonymity so that someone cant just find the product on your page, see its an Amazon product or something and then going directly to Amazon rather than giving you the click through.

2. This is the most important reason in my opinion, masking stops Adblocking software from detecting some affiliate links and removing them, alot of ad blockers started blocking crappy clickbank affiliate style links years ago.

3. Better conversions, ugly URL's are known to have less clicks

4. Less likely for Malware on potential clients computers from high jacking the commission but still not fool proof.

 

[RolandN]

I think it's way better to redirect any affiliate link, this also will help you with the statistics, the link will look better, and a lot of people will not like clicking on affiliate link so mask it or redirect.
I also think a direct affiliate link will take some of your pagerank.

 

[tifosi]

For aff links via wordpress I use the simple urls plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-urls/

Means you can mask the url and get some basic link tracking stats.