Link cloaking

[roey]

What do you use for link cloaking?

[roey]

and is it really worth it?

[Jaz]

You can use a simple .htaccess file for that. This requires mod_rewrite to be enabled at your webserver, though I can't remember the last time I have come across a hosting company that didn't have mod_rewrite enabled.

Create folder "visit" under your public_html (can sometimes also be called "web", "htdocs" etc) using your ftp program.

Create .htaccess file in that folder and add the following lines: (replace [http-prefix] with http, a colon and 2 forward slashes because the forum thinks I want to spam my links here if I inserted them myself)

RewriteEngine On
 
redirect 301 /visit/casino1-name-you-are-promoting/ [http-prefix]actual-casino1.com/?tracker=your-tracker1
redirect 301 /visit/casino2-name-you-are-promoting/ [http-prefix]actual-casino2.com/?tracker=your-tracker2
redirect 301 /visit/casinoN-name-you-are-promoting/ [http-prefix]actual-casinoN.com/?tracker=your-trackerN

Then in order to send visitors to actual casinos with your tracker you just add a link on your page:

<a href="visit/casino1-name-you-are-promoting/">Visit Casino1 Name</a> 

or

<a href="[http-prefix]yoursite.com/visit/casino1-name-you-are-promoting/">Visit Casino1 Name</a> 

[roey]

is there a simple way to negate changing every single link?

[Jaz]

Yes, it's so simple, anyone could do it. You could outsource it to India or China

With this method you need to enter only 1 line to the .htaccess file for each affiliate program you promote. Personally I haven't felt a need to cloak any other links beside these nor promote ridiculous amounts of affiliate programs for .htaccess method to become unmanageable.

May I ask how many links you need cloaked? If they are not your affiliate links, what kind of links are they and why would you want to cloak them?

[roey]

260 ish pages with links on all and add's on most

[Jaz]

Alright so you want to replace existing uncloaked list with cloaked ones, correct?

If you are using some kind of CMS, you could export the database (or specific database tables that hold your link information) by using phpmyadmin (or something similar provided by your webhost) then go over to the sql file (it should be in text format) and use an editor to replace all the links with the ones you want. When you are done, import the database back (I suggest creating a new database). Configure your CMS to use new database and see if everything is ok. If not, you can always switch back to old working database and see what went wrong with the other one.

[Leo]

If you're not using a CMS, and just have a static file for each page, then you can do a Search-Replace within the files.

I use Notepad++ from Notepad++ Home - it's free software, and makes it easy to make changes in hundreds of files at once.

You just select the directory to search and it will find the old text and replace it with the new text super-fast. Then just upload all the files back to the server and you're done.

[roey]

no cms im afraid