The end results will be something like this. To link to an Amazon product, you would simply put

http://yourdomainname.com/amazon/[ASIN]

And this unique link of yours would forward to Amazon’s product and credit you for any sales. As you should’ve guessed, to link to a different product in Amazon’s catalog, you just change the ASIN number in the link above.

This should make it very convenient for you not only to link to Amazon, but also cloak your links effectively.

So, let me show you how to set this up…

First, you need to install the plugin Redirection. Through this plugin, you can setup automatic URL redirects.

Now, in your WordPress admin area, go to “Tools” and then “Redirection”.

You’ll see a section with the heading Add new redirection. Enter the following values in the form below it:

• In Source URL, enter /amazon/([^/]*)
• In Target URL, enter http://www.amazon.com/dp/$1/[Your Amazon Associate ID]
• Make sure that you check the box that says Regular Expression
• Click save, and you’re done!

Now, your blog will automatically direct visitors to Amazon products. All you have to do is supply the ASIN number like in the example above.

If you want more details or if you want to know how to do the same for your ClickBank links, check out my earlier article.

If you have any questions or if anything isn’t clear, feel free to ask in the comments.

I may create a WordPress plugin to make this even easier. Stay tuned for that.

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash
3. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates

Having affiliates promoting your product or service is a great thing. A decent network of affiliates can  send you large volumes of targeted visitors. But you maybe overlooking something else very valuable that you could get from your affiliates — namely, an SEO boost.

Here’s how you can increase your search engine ranking by using links from your affiliates…

Conventional affiliate links

Traditional affiliate links carry very little SEO benefit because they go through several redirections. And some times these redirections lose all SEO power that would otherwise be transferred using a clean link.

What do conventional affiliate links look like? They’re usually long and messy looking. Like this: http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348. If I were to use this affiliate link to promote 7UP, I would write a link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348">Great drink!</a>

When search engines see the snippet of markup above, they know that this page, http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348, is about a great drink. And that influences where the page is ranked in search engines.

In fact, linking with anchor text like above is the most influential SEO factor. That’s why when you type “follow me” in Google, the first website that shows up is Twitter. Many people link to Twitter using Follow Me.

But there is a big problem with the highlighted link above. When the search engine follows it and sees that it points to a page which then redirects the user and attempts to drop a cookie, the search engine realizes this is an affiliate link. It could be biased, therefore it doesn’t transfer SEO power.

But using technology and a link building strategy, you can let some of your affiliates link to you and bring all the link juice with them…

SEO affiliate links

A much more useful link for 7UP would be a direct link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/">Great drink!</a>

If enough people link to 7UP like that, pretty soon www.7up.com would be the #1 website in Google’s results pages for the keyword great drink.  Most keywords only need a handful of trusted links to start influencing search engines.

If you notice, compared to the traditional affiliate link, this SEO link is much shorter. Traditional affiliate links are long because each affiliate requires a unique link. The link usually points to a script that registers the visitor, drops a cookie, and redirects to the product’s page.

The easiest way to do all of that is to have a long link. But one affiliate software company got the idea that tracking where users came from and crediting the right affiliate is still possible using a direct, clean SEO link.

Here’s how it’s done.

If you have a Web analytics software for your website, you must have seen the section in the report that points out the Top Referring Sites. Or you may have landed on a website through Google or Twitter and were greeted by Welcome, Googler! or Welcome, Twitter user! How do these sites know where you’re coming from? They use what’s called HTTP referer [sic]. It’s part of the HTTP protocol and it allows the target website to know where it’s being linked from.

Utilizing this technology, 7UP can group and track all visitors that land on 7up.com through msafi.com without me, as the affiliate, having to use a special link.

How to get started with this new affiliate linking method

From my technical background, I realized the potential of this method and I set out to look if someone has built a system that exploits this technology. Sure enough, I found Post Affiliate Pro. It’s the only affiliate software that is capable of this as far as I know.

Here’s what they say on their website about this linking method:

Search Engine Friendly Links

With Post Affiliate Pro, your affiliate links can be SEO friendly. Customize the link format exactly the way you like it; choose from different linking types:

Standard (redirect)

http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate/scripts/t.php?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (URL parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (Anchor links)

http://www.yoursite.com/#a_aid=1&a_bid=2

SEO links (with mod rewrite)

http://www.yoursite.com/1/2.html

DirectLink (no parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/

Post Affiliate Pro’s extraordinary DirectLink technology offers the best possible linking method – your affiliates link to your site without any additional parameters in the URL.

A few things to consider

In very unusual cases, the HTTP referer will not be reported correctly, and this decreases the reliability of this linking method. Also, without a unique link to send visitors to, affiliates couldn’t promote your product or service to their email list or on forums. But that’s not a big problem because, as I just showed above, Post Affiliate Pro allows multiple methods of linking. So, you can ask your affiliates to use the DirectLink from their websites and the other links for emails and whatever else…

Obviously, Post Affiliate Pro is a self hosted affiliate software, which means it doesn’t come ready with an army of affiliates compared to using an affiliate network such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, or Commission Junction. It also requires more in-house work such as paying the affiliates, managing refunds and whatnot.

Getting the best of both worlds

It is possible to have an in-house as well as an outsourced affiliate program. For example, you can have your product listed on ClickBank and at the same time allow some affiliates to link to you using a direct link.

But, why would anyone use your in-house program instead of your network-managed program?

You can convince some of your affiliates to use the SEO links of the in-house program by giving them a higher commission than the ClickBank affiliates.

Additionally, this technology can also work as a performance reward for link partners. Webmasters will be more willing to link to your website when they know they’ll get paid for converting traffic. This can provide a great boost your link building efforts.

What else can you do to get SEO juice from your affiliates?

If you’re not going to use an affiliate software that allows for SEO links, there is something else you could try to get more SEO power from your affiliates.

Basically, give your affiliates JavaScript powered link codes.

Going back to 7UP. If 7UP is like most online merchants, their website would have a section or a page dedicated to affiliates — welcoming them, giving them instructions, ideas, linking tools, and so on. In that section, they can provide HTML code to their affiliates like this:

<a href="http://www.7up.com" onclick="location.href='http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348'; return false;">
Great drink!</a>

In Google’s eyes, this is a direct link to 7up.com. However, when a real human user clicks on this link, the JavaScript-powered browser would actually take the user to the affiliate link that is specified in onclick.

For example, see this link: Google. When you hover over this link, your status bar at the bottom tells you that if you click on this link, you’re going to go to http://www.google.com. But try clicking on it, it’ll actually take you to the homepage of msafi.com.

This is cool and all, but there are a few things to consider. First, supposedly, search engines have become smarter at detecting JavaScript like this. Second, for people who don’t have a JavaScript powered browser (a fractional minority), the affiliate commission will be lost as those users will be taken to the direct link and not the affiliate link.

Dominating the SERPs

None of what’s written here is considered unacceptable black hat practice. Whether you decide to use the Post Affiliate Pro SEO link method or simply provide a JavaScript powered HTML code to your affiliates, you’ll sure see positive results in your ranking.

Alternatively, you can use Post Affiliate Pro direct link as a reward for link partners. It could make it much easier for you to convince and acquire new link partners and affiliates. And therefore, dominate the SERPs.

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
3. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash

If you currently have or plan to have plenty of affiliate links on your WordPress based website, you should have a way to easily track and manage these affiliate links. You want to know how many clicks each link received and you want to be able to edit and change the affiliate link without having to revisit and change old content.

And to keep your website clean and organized in the eyes of search engines, there are a few things that will need tweaking.

Here’s how I create, manage and cloak my affiliate links.

Using Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that is made by John Godley, who works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Redirection helps you manage your blog URLs. Using Redirection, you could create a link like http://msafi.com/gotogoogle/ and set that link to forward to http://google.com. Similarly, you could put all your affiliate forwarders in a virtual directory like:

• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product1/
• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product2/
• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product3/
• and so on…

Most people don’t use affiliate for the directory name, though. They use goto or visit. Or like on this website, I simply use a.

Redirection also allows you to group related URL redirections together. So, you could create a group, name it Affiliate Links and put all your affiliate links there.

Create an affiliate link in Redirection

Once you have Redirection installed

1. Click on Groups in the top left corner
2. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see Add Group. Enter Affiliate Links in the textbox, and click Add.
3. Click on your newly added group, Affiliate Links
4. In the source URL, put something like /visit/product-xyz/ (don’t include your domain name, http://ursite.com)
5. For Match, select URL only
6. For Action, select Redirect to URL
7. Leave Regular expression unchecked
8. In Target URL, put your affiliate link

That’s it. You’ve added your first affiliate link to Redirection.

Now whenever you want to link to Product XYZ, use http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/. It’s even easier to remember.

Redirection also gives you the number of hits each link received. So, if you’re putting your links in relevant places and getting huge volumes of clicks but maybe no sales, you’ll know something is going on…

Cool tip: get Redirection to automatically create ClickBank affiliate links for you!

If you promote products for ClickBank, here’s a cool tip that you’ll find very useful.

All of ClickBank’s links have the following structure

http://YourClickBankID.VendorClickBankID.hop.clickbank.net

You can tell Redirection to automatically fill in the VendorClickBankID field for you based on a value that you provide in your URL. Like:

http://ursite.com/cb/vendorx311/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.vendorx311.hop.clickbank.net

and

http://ursite.com/cb/sumvendor2/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.sumvendor2.hop.clickbank.net

…and so on…

Here’s how you do this in Redirection:

1. In the Source URL, enter /cb/([^/]*)
2. In Target URL, enter http://yourClickBankID.$1.hop.clickbank.net
3. Make sure Regular expression is checked
4. Match should be set to URL only
5. Action should be set to Redirect URL

I have done this on my website here at msafi.com. So, now I can simply give out a link like http://msafi.com/cb/4idiots/. This will redirect to http://mksafi.4idiots.hop.clickbank.net, which is the landing sales page for the product sold by 4idiots ClickBank vendor. You can replace 4idiots with any ClickBank vendor ID and it will still work.

Pretty cool isn’t it?

Perhaps a similar trick can be done to automate link cloaking and management for Amazon and Commission Junction, but I’ll have to look into that.

For now, let’s look into optimizing your affiliate links so that Google will not have trouble with them…

Helping Google not trip over your affiliate links

Now that you have a convenient and easy way to create and organize affiliate links, I’m gonna show you how to make sure that Google will not discriminate against your blog as a result of affiliate links.

First, whenever you add an affiliate link as anchor text make sure that you include a rel=”nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag. That is

Bad: <a href=”http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/”>Product XYZ</a>

Good: <a href=”http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/” rel=”nofollow”>Product XYZ</a>

If you want to automate the creation of anchor text links in WordPress, check out the plugin I created: Word 2 Cash.

Second, use robots.txt to disallow Google (and other search engines) from accessing your virtual affiliate links URL directories. Your affiliate link directories are /visit/, /cb/ and whatever else you may have created.

In your robots.txt file add lines like:

Disallow: /visit/*
Disallow: /cb/*

Do the same for any other affiliate link directory you have.

This will help Google index your website in a clean way and hopefully minimize discrimination against your outbound links.

That’s all there is to it. You now have a great way to create and manage your affiliate links. Just one last thing before you go.

Reducing Redirection database size

Redirection keeps a record of every redirect it makes. It stores these records in your database. If you’re gonna be using the plugin the way I described in this post, your records can build up and take a lot of space pretty quickly. What you want to do is set the records to expire after some time, say 30 days. To do that:

1. go to Redirection’s admin page
2. Click on Options
3. In the Expire Logs field, enter 30 and click Save.

Aaaaaaand you’re done!

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates
3. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash

Word 2 Cash is a free WordPress plugin. Its purpose is to turn specified keywords on your blog into links.

For example, suppose you want every instance of the word WordPress in your posts to be an anchor text pointing to http://wordpress.org. This plugin can do that for you automatically.

Just go to the administration page of the plugin and enter:

wordpress, http://wordpress.org

Now, WordPress becomes WordPress.

The original purpose of the plugin was to turn keywords into affiliate links. Hence, the name – Word 2 Cash.

This plugin can be used as a good alternative to commercial plugins such as Ninja Affiliate.

Limitation

To me, the issues below are not limitations because I implemented the plugin this way. It’s the way that suits me. This maybe the way that suits you best, too.

Okay…first…

The attributes rel=”nofollow” and target=”_blank” are automatically added to the HTML of every link. The plugin doesn’t give you a choice with this.

In case you don’t know, rel=”nofollow” tells Google not to increase the target website’s ranking as a result of this link. And target=”_blank” opens the link in a new window/tab.

Second. Some people may prefer to limit the number of instances that should be turned into anchor texts. You can’t do that with this plugin. Every instance will be turned into anchor text. However, if links on your posts are NOT styled to be big bright blue color with underline, turning all instances into anchor text won’t make your content look cluttered or spammy or anything…

Support

I provide voluntary support for this plugin. I don’t promise that I’ll fix your issues (if you have any), but feel free to post in the comments below and you may get an answer.

Download and Installation

Download the plugin from here…

To install, simply place the plugin in the WordPress plugins folder and activate it from the administration panel.

Credits

The core function for this plugin was taken from SEO Smart Links and it was modified by me.

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress