As the title suggests, the word “cloak” has two common meanings in affiliate marketing.
We’ve received many inquiries about our Cloak redirect type in Pretty Links and how it differs from other redirects. That is covered in more detail below.
First, understand the word cloak itself. To cloak means to hide, cover, or disguise something.
By that meaning, aren’t all shortened links of any redirect type technically cloaked? Yes.
Most Common Form of Cloaking: Link Shortening With Redirects
Shortening a long, ugly affiliate link into a shorter, prettier URL is a form of cloaking. When you search the internet on the matter, you’ll find that more often than not, when an author mentions “cloaking,” they mean any kind of link shortening.
Link shortening is a good way to “cloak” your affiliate links and create short, memorable URLs that are easy to share. It also helps prevent commission hijacking by masking your affiliate ID from commission-hijacking scripts. So if your goal is protecting your affiliate links from commission hijacking while benefiting from pretty, memorable URLs, any form of link shortening will do.
Least Common Form of Cloaking: Target URL Masking
The other form of cloaking hides the target URL from the visitor, so they cannot see it in their address bar even after clicking your shortened affiliate link. There are a couple of ways to do this; Pretty Links uses iframes. Pretty Links includes an additional redirect type for this called Cloak. This redirect type loads the target URL in an iframe, hiding the target URL from the visitor’s address bar. This form of cloaking has largely been frowned upon by many merchants and SEO experts, and is generally not recommended for affiliate marketing. Many merchants have taken measures to block it completely.
So What Type Should I Use?
We strongly recommend using 301/307 or Meta Refresh/JavaScript redirect types to shorten and cloak your links. iframes still have their place, but the reasons are few and far between. See Entendendo os tipos de redirecionamento for a breakdown of the different redirect types.
Ainda confuso? Contact our support, and we’ll do our best to answer your questions.