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Making Money from the Web:
Cloaking URLs
Cloaking an URL is the practice of using one URL that automatically transfers you to another URL. Often this is used to disguise one URL (often a long affiliate URL) as if it were another URL. Thus the URL 'http://www.this.is.a.long.ulr.com/affiliate/affiliate_id=this_is_my_id' is represented by 'http:www.celtnet.org.uk/nemeton/1.html'. The second URL is far simpler than the first and looks like a normal web-page rather than a marketing URL. However, clicking on the second URL simply directs you to the first URL.
I used to take a very 'white hat' approach to this, saying that I would never use such underhanded tactics to obfuscate any URL I was using. Inded, these practices can definitely seem to be more than a little under-handed. Then a sequence of events ocurred that made me re-appraise my stance and I saw that URL cloaking could be an useful tool in the internet marketer's arsenal.
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URL Cloaking: Accepting the Dark Side
About two months ago, though visitor numbers to my site were remaining the same I saw a siginficant drop-off in the apparent number of people who were clicking on my various affiiate links. I obviously went through all the usual and immediate thoughts: had I changed anything? had my affiliate partners changed anything? All these options proffered me were a resounding 'no'. Then, as one should always do, I went back to my page logs. When I looked at these, the number of visitors to my pages remained essentially the same. It was only my click-through and conversion rates that had changed significantly. What was going on then? OK, so some of the links were obvious affiliate links and these might be putting some people off. But even that wouldn't account for all the drop-off I was seeing. Was I the victim of affiiate hijacking? (this is where an user stips off the affiliate ID from an URL before visiting the URL themselves). It was a possibility that I couldn't afford to ignore as it was definitely eating into my bottom line now.
The solution was obvious, though it wasn't exactly a path that I wanted to take. Still, I could view the entire process as an 'experiment'. That way I coult try out cloaking just one of the URLs on my failing pages to see what would happen. This is precisely what I did. I set up a special directory on my main site and put a 'jump' page in there whose only job was to redirect one of my affiliate links to the true affiliate page. As an example of this working, have a look at these two URLs: http://www.100000usd.com/?afid=AF534S2336 (not very elegant is it) and http://www.celtnet.org.uk/nemeton/1.html (looks like a real URL doesn't it). Now if you click on both those URLs you'll get new popup windows that transfer you to precisely the same web page. Now that's pretty cool, isn't it...
After about a week I had another look at the various statistics for my site: and to my surprise, the overall number of visits to the page of interest were about the same. However, the number of clicks on my cloaked URL had gone up even higher than it was before I saw that I had a problem and, as a result, the number of people actually buying my affiliate products had also gone up. Indeed, using the cloaked URL I had about a 15% improvement on my very best numbers before I'd used cloaking. There was definitely something to this cloaking and it looked as if not using it was affecting my bottom line.
Soon I'd gone through many of my web pages and altering many affiiate URLs to cloaked URLs meant that my income from affiliate purchases actually increased quite dramatically. I might not like cloaking URLs, but not doing so was hurting my bottom line. As a result I simply had to take the plunge.
How to Cloak your URLs
I think that I've show that the cloaking of URLs can be a very useful tool in the arsenal of internet marketers. Knowing this, the next quesion is: how do your perform URL cloaking? If you are using Apache as your webserver then in the top level of your home site you will have a file called .htaccess. This can be edited to add permanent redirects that will automatically map one URL onto another. An example of using .htaccess to perform the example mapping that I've already described is shown below:
IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*
<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>
<Limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>
redirect 301 http://www.celtnet.org.uk/nemeton/1.html http://www.100000usd.com/?afid=AF534S2336
Your version of the file may be longer or shorter than this, however the important entry is the 301 redirect line. Simply enter as many of these as you need at the bottom of your .htaccess file to cover all the URLs you want to redirect then copy the file to your webserver. After changing your .htaccess file, please check that your website is still working as an error in this file can bring down your entire website. Then check to make sure that your redirects are working.
The next method works whether or not you have an Apache webserver, for it uses one of the basic means by which web pages work. In effect, for each redirect you want you're correcting a web-page with no content whose only function is to perform the redirect for you. You could place all these URLs in the top level of your website (which would make the resultant URLs very short). However, as I have a fairly large website already I create a sub-directory to place all my redirect pages. For me this is the http://www.celtnet.org.uk/nemeton/ directory and all the redirect HTML pages go in here. But what does a redirect page actually look like? In effect it's a pared-down web page such as the one below:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" >
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Redirect page for 100000usd affiliate page." />
<meta name="keywords" content="redirect, affiliate, 100000usd" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url=http://www.100000usd.com/?afid=AF534S2336">;
<title>Jump to 10000usd affiliate page</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
As you can see this is basically a very pared-down HTML page. Simply save your version of this in whichever directory you've chosen to serve your redirection pages form.
In terms of functionality the critical line in the file above is this one:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url=http://www.100000usd.com/?afid=AF534S2336">;
This meta tag in the HTML page's header refreshes the current page after a time given by the 'content' tag (I've used '0' for immediately in my page). The code then substitutes the url given by the 'url' tag for the URL of the current page, which is how the redirection is done. All very simple. Despite the simplicity of the process there are some companies such as tinyurl.com that provide free URL redirects as a service for the web community. Indeed, if you wished you could write a fairly simple Perl script to allow your website to provide this service for others (I'm working on this for another website now).
Conclusion
In the ever more cut-throat realm of internet marketing its becoming more and more important to protect your website and your income-making URLs. I've hopefully shown you that URL cloaking (also known as URL obfuscation) is not something to be afraid of. Indeed, it's something that someone with only basic HTML skills can implement easily for their own website. Remember, it could save you $100s in any given year.
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