Cloak and Redirect Links

[nimonogi]

Affiliate links should always be cloaked – you can do this by using our powerful redirect addon for your links to hide the actual URL and then telling Google not to flow PageRank to them to safeguard yourself against their sensitive algorithm and also future updates.

 

This addon does a 302 redirect and sends an X-Robots-Tag header along with noindex and nofollow, which makes sure search engines aren’t allowed to index or follow the URLs.

 

Examples:

http://www.yourdomain.com/go/a100 --> http://www.yourdomain.com/*?aff=100
http://www.yourdomain.com/go/g --> http://www.google.com
http://www.yourdomain.com/go/whmcs --> https://www.whmcs.com/features/
http://www.yourdomain.com/go/cpdemo --> http://x3demob.cpx3demo.com:2082/login/?user=x3demob&pass=x3demob

 

Why cloak and redirect affiliate links?

If you search online for it, there are tons of reasons to redirect affiliate links.

• Ease of management
  
• Prevent leaking PageRank to advertisers
  
• “Clean” links
  
• Search engines encourage the redirection of links
  

This quote, copied from Google Webmasters makes their stand on redirection of links quite obvious. It is a practice that they do encourage.

 

Note that PPC (pay-per-click) advertising links that don’t pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad do not violate our guidelines. You can prevent PageRank from passing in several ways, such as:

 

Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag

Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

 

Compatible with WHMCS v5.x and v6.x

 

Visit our WHMCS Addons page for Pricing and Screenshot

Edited August 16, 2015 by nimonogi