Advanced link cloaking techniques

The interesting discussion between Rand and Jeremy had me thinking about some of the things affiliates do to protect their links. I am talking about link cloaking — the art of hiding links.

We can hide links from our potential customer (in the case of affiliate links), and we can hide them from the search engines as well (as in the case of reciprocal links, paid links, etc.).

While I think cloaking affiliate links to prevent others from stealing your commissions is useful, I am not encouraging you to use the techniques I am about to explain. I certainly think it is very important to understand link cloaking in order to protect yourself when you are buying products, services or links.

When I am reading a product endorsement, I usually mouse over the link to see if it is an affiliate link. Why? I don’t mind the blogger making a commission’; but, If I see he or she is trying to hide it via redirects, Java-script, etc. I don’t perceive it is as an endorsement.  I feel it is a concealed ad. When I see <aff>, editor’s note, etc. I feel I can trust the endorsement.

Another interesting technique is the cloaking of links to the search engines. The reasoning behind this concept is so that your link partners think you endorse them, but you tell the search engines that you don’t. Again, I am not supporting this.

Cloaking links to the potential customers.

Several of the techniques, I’ve seen are:

Script redirects – the use of simple script that takes a key (i.e: merchant=eBay), pulls the affiliate link from a database or from an in-line dictionary (programming term), and sends the visitor’s browser an HTTP 302 or 301 (temporary or permanent redirect) to the merchant site.

Meta refreshes – the use of blank HTML pages with the meta refresh tag and the affiliate tracking code embedded. This is very popular.

In-line Java-script– the use of Java-script to capture the mouse over, and the right click event from the target link, in order to make the status bar display the link without the tracking code. I feel this one is very deceptive.

Encoding URLs – the use of HTML character entities or URL encoding to obfuscate the tracking links or tracking codes from your visitors. This works because browsers understand the encoding and humans are unable to understand them without some work.

Java-script + image links – This is really advanced. I haven’t seen this being used much. The idea is to use Java-script to capture the on_click event and have the code pull a transparent image before transferring control to the new page. The trick is that the URL of the transparent image, is in reality a tracking script, that receives the tracking code as a parameter or as part of the URL.

Cloaking links to the search engines.

These are some of the techniques I’ve seen:

Use of rel=”no-follow” anchor attribute. I would not say this is technically cloaking, but the results are the same. Search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live) will not ‘respect’ those links.

Use of no-follow and/or no-index meta tag. There is a slight difference between the use of no-follow in the anchor link tag vs the meta robots tag. When used on the robots meta tag it means: “do not follow the links on this page”. When used on the anchor tag it tells the search engine “do not consider my link for your scoring” ( this link is not a vote/endorsement).

Crawler user agent check. This consists in detecting the search engine crawler by user agent via the HTTP REFERRER header and hiding the link or presenting the search engine a link with rel-no-follow. Normal visitors will not see this.

Crawler IPs check. Black hat SEOs keep a list of search engine crawler IP addresses to make cloaking more effective. While search engine crawlers announce their presence via the user agent header, when using cloaking detection algorithms they don’t.  Keeping a record of crawler IPs help detect them.

Once the crawler is detected, the same technique I just mentioned is used to hide the target links.

Robot.txt disallow. Disallowing search engine crawlers access to specific sections of your website (ie: link partner pages)via robot.txt, is another way to effectively hide those links from the search engines.

The use of robots-nocontent class. This is a relatively new addition (only Yahoo supports this at the moment). With this CSS class, you can tell the Yahoo crawler that you don’t want it to index portions of a page. Hiding link sections is another way to cloak links.

Robot.txt disallow + crawler IPs check. I haven’t seen this being used, but it’s technically possible. The idea is to  present search engines a different version of your robot.txt file than you present to users. The version you present to the search engines prohibits sections of your site where the links you want o hide are. You detect the search engine robot either by the user agent or by a list of known robots’ IP addresses. Note that you can prevent the search crawler from caching the robot.txt file making detection virtually impossible.

Now, as I said before, I am not exposing these techniques to promote them. On the contrary, here’s why it’s important to detect them.

The best way to detect cloaked links is to look closely at the HTML source and robot.txt file, and specially at the cache versions of those files. If you are buying or trading links for organic purposes (assuming you don’t get reported as spam by your competitors), don’t buy or trade links that use any of these techniques or that prevent the search engines from caching the robots.txt file or page in question.

Why start SEO and Affiliate Marketing with PPC?

1. Accurate keyword research.  There are numerous keyword research tools that help you identify keywords that people are searching for, their volume of searches, level of competition, etc… Unfortunately, every single tool has a critical problem: the source of the information.

Wordtracker relies on information from meta search engine Dogpile, and similar sources. Yahoo mixes plurals, singulars, and phrases typed in different order; the information reported is from the previous month. Google tries to estimate traffic and fails to provide good predictions most of the time. There are other popular tools that have similar problems.

Running a test PPC campaign for a week or two will provide actual and dependable statistics about the amount and quality of the traffic to be expected for each keyword.

2. High click-through titles and descriptions. Page titles and meta descriptions are what people will normally see in the search results. We need to provide an incentive for the searcher to click-through.

Unfortunately it is very tricky to test changing titles and meta descriptions for SEO. We need to be able to rank first!

PPC management tools are designed so that we can easily split test multiple ads and the system will tell us which ads perform better. When we find the winning PPC ads we can use them to create our titles and meta descriptions.

3. High converting landing pages. Having a high conversion rate and high converting landing pages is not only important for our bottom line, it’s very important to retain top affiliates as well.

Another advantage of running test PPC campaigns is that we can tweak our landing pages until they give us the desired results.

Top affiliates measure the merchants effectiveness by their earn per click (EPC) — how much they make from every click they send. You can offer large commissions, incentives, etc… What really matters is how well their traffic will convert.

Even if you don’t plan to run a PPC campaign, it makes perfect sense to run at least one as a test to help you improve the results you will get with other channels.

Finding profitable niches

Oftentimes what we would really like to do, will not bring the money we need to survive immediately.

What I really love is writing software and solving problems, yet I had to learn the boring part of business and marketing.  I was very lucky that SEO required a great deal of technical understanding and was really fun to do in the early days.

In order to support myself and fund my software business, I started doing affiliate marketing in highly profitable markets such as on-line pharmacy, finance, travel, etc. These markets are extremely competitive, however with the right knowledge and tools you can thrive.  Take for example one of my old affiliate sites http://www.tripscan.com  which ranks organically in the top 20 (used to be top 5 when I was actively marketing it)  in Yahoo for the highly competitive phrase “vacation package” which has more than 50 million competing sites.

The key is to start small and find keywords that nobody else — or a few smart ones — have thought about.  Most people call this “the long tail” but let me tell you that it is longer than most marketers think.

Let me give you an example of how I find keywords with very little competition and a lot of searches.

When most marketers do keyword research they think of keywords in terms of their solutions not in terms of their customers’ problems.  Now let me ask you this:  When you go to your doctor because you feel something is wrong, but you don’t know what it is; do you ask your doctor:  Can I take ABC medicine to feel better?  Or you tell your doctor your symptoms and wait for the tests and diagnosis?

Similarly, customer go to search engines looking for answers to their specific problems.  Most of them don’t know the solutions yet and most marketers miss this big opportunity.

For example one way I use to find out what my potential customers want is to read the support forums and Google groups they visit.  They will post questions asking for help and they usually use the same words when searching for help.

It is smart to use those same words in our Google ads or in our titles, descriptions and page copy.

Hopefully this trick will not lose effect now that I made it public.

Measuring your affiliate success

As an affiliate you have many advantages.  You don’t need to keep inventory; manage people, suppliers, banks, etc…

You only need to concentrate on marketing.  Find good and reliable merchants and create content to pre-sell their stuff.

I started as an affiliate 5 years ago and I can attest that it works. You can gradually build a good source of income selling other people stuff.

If you are an entrepreneur as well, your journey should not stop there.  You need to plan for building something of value that you can later sell.

My affiliate years tough me a lot about marketing and business.  As a geek I didn’t have those critical skills.

In order to grow your affiliate business you need to carefully track what is working and what is not, down to the keyword level.  This is an advantage that merchants have over their affiliates:  their analytics software can give them all of this critical information.  These systems are not designed for affiliates.

Let me share a tip:  a technique I used as an affiliate to better track my campaigns.

Most merchant affiliate tracking systems allow you to segment the clicks and sales by campaigns (i.e.  http://www.merchant.com/track_affiliate.php?id=100&campaign=optin).

I created two simple php scripts to take advantage of this.  I would point my PPC landing pages to the first (see:   http://www.site.com/track.php?p=index.php&se=gg&k=tramadol).

This script will create a cookie with the keywords and search engine.

The second script was a redirect script that had all my merchant tracking links. This script would read the previously set cookie and would dynamically modify the campaign parameter to the merchant to match the values in the cookie.

It was a bit rudimentary but it served its purpose. I was able to bid more for the best keywords and cut the non-performing ones.

A better option is for the merchant to let affiliates provide their conversion counters through their back-end.  We are working to provide this feature to our affiliates.