Hide my affiliate url?

I just found a cool affiliate program for my site. I have the oportunity to get other webmasters to join the program and get a tier comission. How can I hide my affiliate URL?

Use Javascript!

Cheers

Critter

Too complicated...lol

I just used tinyurl.com to change it

Or your could create a PHP file that handles this for you, this way you keep your site url but can hide the "AFF ID =" bit from displaying.

If javascript seems complicated to me, PHP is the same as speaking Japanese

Thanks for the help, but I just used tinyurl to change the address. I forgot to ad that I needed a way to hide the affiliate url in emails I am sending, so I couldn't use any scripts.

Redirect.

I've just heard that G is looking for those hidden javascripts to hide URL's - I wouldn't use anything like that.........

To be really honest - I don't know what I would do with an affiliate URL....

Anyway you look at it your violating terms if you hide it.... I focus on a really good selling program and either base it on traffic of your site and NOT hide the url - or go with a pay-per-click...

If it's a good seller - then you'll make you money........

I'm starting to not even like the word "Redirect".... and I'm pretty sure googlebot doesn't like it either...

Of course I'm not violating any terms. It is a common practice to cloak or hide your affiliate urls. There are loads of programs that do this, although as I aren't very involved in affiliate marketing, I don't see the need to spend my money on one.

People need to hide their affiliate urls because if a visitor sees a url like "www.tshirts.com?affid=4433" they could easily avoid clicking on the URL and just type in the address bar "www.tshirts.com", so if they buy something, you loose your comission.

If instead of that you have a hidden url they don't know the address and need to click on your link, so they get a traking cookie and any purchase they make is credited to you.

Yea - but how many people do you really think are going to remove your affiliate id?

I would imagine that the nets best buyers aren't exactly internet savy....

I know how to do that - and even I have never found a reason to jerk someone out of there affiliate commision....

Is cloaking and hiding it really only for that reason?

mm... I don't see what other reason there could be ??:

I figured it was an seo thing since I feel pretty confident that Google is filtering out urls with affid=???

Atleast I'm pretty sure they are...

I hide them only because I have heard that google may penalize pages with obvious affiliate links on them. Not sure if there is truth in this but I figure better safe than sorry.

We have actually decided to change our affiliate tracking we currently have on our sites. Many reasons for this.

The better I optimize our casino sites and the better they rank the more commission some of my affiliates get. Google, Yahoo and gang simply add the affiliate tags and they get $ for what I do right. What is fair in that. Also it seems that visitors remove the affiliate tags because they hate other people making money of them. From August our program will pass the ID in ASP.

could you in theroy have google index your code, and so when a end user clicks = $$$ directly from google

you should be able to create some sort of php/asp page that just has a redirect with the actual affiliate url in that. maybe that will work?