IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of September 2011 SSC seems to have gone offline. We don’t know if this is permanent or not but it is certainly a shame and we have no idea what the reasons for the site’s disappearance may be. The script is still working just fine for us. However, if the links to the program do not work for you when you visit and you are looking for a WordPress solution we’ve added a couple of options for you. Fairly new is the Eclipse Advanced Link Cloaker which may be a good alternative and comes in the form of a plugin.

The other noteworthy WordPress plugin that comes to mind is Ninja Affiliate from Max Blog Press so we’ve added a video below to help you decide if this one is for you or not. We give it a highly recommended because we know it works very well indeed and has some features you won’t find anywhere else, combining not only effective link cloaking abilities but also keyword inlinks and other nifty options.

If you would prefer a non WordPress alternative at a very low cost, take a look here at Affiliate Link Defender which you can pick up for less than six bucks.

I wrote a review of Samurai Stealth Cloaker some time ago and hailed it as the best link cloaking script on the market at the time. To date, I have still not seen anything better and I finally got around to doing a demo video which shows the script in action.

There are many good reasons to cloak affiliate links – more professional looking URL’s from your own domain, shorter URL’s, disguising your affiliate status and to a degree, helping you avoid the stripping of your affiliate ID by visitors who don’t want  you to get paid for their own unfathomable reasons.

Up to a point, the claims of commission theft are true and they also make for sensational ad copy but let’s be realistic. Average internet users wouldn’t know an affiliate link if it bit them on the a**, so if your selling something not related to internet marketing or SEO for example, it’s doubtful they are going to bypass your link. On the other hand, particularly with Clickbank products, no matter what you do, once a savvy Clickbank affiliate lands on the payment page they can easily clear their cookies and return to buy through their own link, so cloaking does not protect you from those folks at all.

One of the most valid reasons for using redirects is the management aspect of your links. Let’s say you promote a product related to WordPress – you may link to that product in a huge number of blog posts and articles, perhaps using an automatic linking plugin for instance, meaning that you could have hundreds of links on countless web pages. If that product becomes outdated, or is withdrawn from the market, or goes away for any of a variety of reasons, you either have a load of broken links to fix by trying to find and amend each one, or you just leave the broken links littering your content – not a great option.

If you use redirects, all you ever have to do is change one link and all the instances of that redirect will automatically be updated. Using a script like Samurai Stealth Cloaker enables you to login to your admin panel and with a couple of mouse clicks all your redirects are changed in seconds. That is a very worthwhile plus point, and the more affiliate links you generate over time, the more important it becomes.

SSC is very easy to install on your server and once it’s done, you can see from the video how easy it is to use. We’ve chosen a complicated scenario in the video, basically to show the power of “stealth” redirects and the fact that once you have placed your affiliate cookie, you can send a visitor to absolutely any page you like – great if the sales page is crap, or you’ve maybe done all the preselling in a review on your own site for example. In our example we show how you, the affiliate, can send someone to your own opt-in page, capture the lead, and then send the visitor straight to the sales page as opposed to the merchant’s lead capture page, or even straight to the order page.

The script can also handle simple PHP redirects or mask your link in a frame (we would not recommend using frames however – see this post on cloaking links and Internet Explorer which explains why) but the stealth option is what makes the script most powerful. In rare cases however, the stealth link may break an affiliate link so it’s always wise to double check your redirect before publishing it to the world. In my experience with SSC it has handled various networks with no problems at all and I’ve only ever had a couple of affiliate links where it broke something along the way. Just be aware that it can happen.

Here’s the video demo of Samurai Stealth Cloaker

I’d also like to mention another redirect script that I use in certain circumstances, particularly when I’m sending customers or visitors to a download – you’ll see how you can add one time offers and instead of just seeing a click to download box pop up, your visitor views another offer or offers while they wait for their product delivery. It seems to work pretty well if you keep the offers relevant. (Sorry but I have withdrawn the sales page for this tool as interest tailed off considerably in the past couple of years)