Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress
I’ve created a plugin for WordPress that can cloak outgoing links in your posts and/or pages.
Features
- Choose what to cloak – all links, only the links you specify or no links at all.
- Choose where to cloak – posts, pages or both.
- Configure the URL – you can set the “prefix” part of the URL (see examples below).
- Exception list – links pointing to domains in this list will not be cloaked. For example, this is useful if you have chosen to cloak all links but don’t want to cloak the links to your own domains.
- Compatible with all browsers – the link cloaker plugin doesn’t use JavaScript so it will work even for visitors that have disabled JS.
- “Smart” cloaking – relative, ambiguous or malformed URLs will not be cloaked. Better safe than sorry.
- As of version 1.1, static link cloaking.
New! The premium version of this plugin is now available and includes several new features :
- Cloak links in any part of your site, including the comment section and the sidebar.
- Works with plugin-created links.
- Five new cloaking types – for example, you can display the cloaked URL in a frame, or use a special redirect that hides the referrer.
- Improved link management and click statistics.
- Free automatic updates.
- And more. Check out EclipseCloaker.com for complete details.
Examples
Here’s a link explicitly tagged for cloaking -
<a href="http://evil-guide.tripod.com/"><!--cloak-->A Cloaked Link</a>
And here’s what it looks like in the post – A Cloaked Link
If you have configured the plugin to cloak all links (the default) you don’t need the <!–cloak–> tag inside your links.
Installation
- Download the link-cloaking-plugin.zip file.
- Unzip the file.
- Upload the `link-cloaking-plugin` folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- (Optional) Go to Settings -> Link Cloaking and modify the default settings to your liking.
- Re-save your permalink settings to insert the plugin’s link redirection code to the WordPress .htaccess file : go to Settings -> Permalinks and click “Save Changes”.
Download
Version 1.8.2 : link-cloaking-plugin.zip (10 KB)
Requirements :
- WordPress 2.8 – 3.0.1
mod_rewrite. If “pretty permalinks” work on your blog then you probably have this already.
[...] I’ve created a plugin for WordPress that can cloak links in your blog posts and pages. Read more and download the plugin here. [...]
You mean link masking. I was thinking you had a search engine cloaking thingie going (showing different content or links to search engines)
Thanks
On internet marketing forums and similar sites this is often referred to as “cloaking” so I used that term here. There’s a whole bunch of related techniques, call them what you like – cloaking, masking, obfuscation.
I’ve heard about search engine cloaking but I haven’t really investigated that topic.
Thanks for the plugin, i think it will work well on my blog for affiliate links
Thanks for the plugin. Is it possible to cloak links in the sidebar, for example I put an affiliate link in the blogroll?
Ramil – no, not yet. I’ll think about adding that feature. I’m not sure it’s possible/easy to do though because on most WordPress blogs the sidebar is handled by “widgets” which could be a problem.
If you have the link in question in a post you can copy & paste the cloaked link to the sidebar and it should work unless you add/remove links to the post with that link.
Thank you for an excellent plugin and for making my life easier!
Jai
How can i get rid of the numbers at the end of the cloaked link? The post id and link id?
HiTech,
In this version you can’t get rid of them. They’re what allows me to keep the plugin simple and relatively fast.
To be able to ommit the numbers I’d have to either encode all of the original URL in the cloaked link (leading to long links with weird characters in them) or store the links in a database (meaning you’d need to set up every cloaked link manually). I’ll think about adding the second feature in a future version.
Most affiliate links will not work becuase they are relative, ambiguous or malformed URLs
Huh? That is simply not true.
Most affiliate links are not relative, as they point to a different site. They’re most likely unambiguous for the same reason. Malformed URLs probably wouldn’t work in most browsers, so if your links work, it’s likely they are well-formed.
From software perspective, affiliate links are no different from “ordinary” links.
[...] cloaking in wordpress I found a goos WordPress plugin for cloaking links here : Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com. It works great for me ! [...]
Sorry,
i thought they were not working because of all the characters but I missed a step in my installation
it actually works great
That’s okay, it’s good that you got it sorted out
[...] time ago I created a WordPress plugin that can cloak affiliate links automatically. Today I’m releasing a new version, with all-new [...]
[...] Visit [...]
I just came across this and am playing with it, I love what I see so far, thank you
. There is one thing that I’d like to do, for affiliate links it’s a good idea to tag &afsrc=1 at the end of a cloaked link (to protect your commissions from being stolen from parasites and spyware).
I’m sure I could add that somewhere in the plugin files so that every link I cloak automatically gets that appended to the cloaked link. I just don’t have a clue how to do that though. Could you advise?
Just to clarify, when the &afsrc=1 is on the cloaked link, I mean that the link will be like this (using your example above):
http://w-shadow.com/goto/A_Cloaked_Link/45/4&afsrc=1
Hmm, doing that may be possible, but I don’t understand how would that help against spyware?
As for editing the files – if you’re familiar with PHP, you can take a look at the wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php file, lines 87-90. This is where the final form of automatically cloaked links is determined. You could modify that, but then you’d need to also modify the URL rewriting rules on line 157 so that the links still work…
If you explain how it’s supposed to work and why &afsrc=1 is good against spyware, I may be able to implement the changes myself and send you the modified file.
First of all, great plugin! Thank you!
I’m trying to add NOFOLLOW tags to my cloaked affiliate links so the end result is:
Test
becomes
Test
Can you tell me which lines of the script I should replace, and with what?
Thank you again!
Just to clarify, the plugin is designed so that you can add the nofollow tag to the uncloaked link and it will stay there when it’s cloaked, too.
Now, for your question – the quick & dirty solution would be to replace line 90 (the one that starts with “return”) in the file wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php with this line :
Try it out. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might cause conflicts with other link rewriting plugins (and similar), but it should work well enough in most cases.
Hi White Shadow,
I found your plugin just a couple of days ago. After trying several other plugins/solutions to cloak my links…and failing to get them to work, imagine my excitement when I turned on your plugin and it worked right out of the box.
I LOVE it!
One question…
Do “hits” refer to actual clicks on those links or just page views?
Curtis Penner
Hey, I’m glad you like it
“Hits” refer to the number of times a link has been followed, so you could say it’s pageviews… except the “real” pageview count is probably lower, because search engines and other bots would also be counted as “hits”.
Creating a reliable click stats report is nontrivial and I’m not aiming for that – the “Hits” figure is there to give a general idea about the link’s popularity only. You might want to find a separate plugin for accurate stats, or use Google Analytics. You can put the Analytics code on your blog with the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin (this is what I do on this blog).
Having problems with the 2.3 version of word press
it seems to be slowing down
Also it would not write to .ht access file
Does it have anything to do with file permissions
What do you mean “slowing down”? Anyway, it’s probably something to do with WP itself.
If WordPress can write to .htaccess, so can the plugin, because it works from within WP. I assume you have tried updatibg permalinks, right?
Hi.
Great plugin. However I am getting a 404 when I use it. Do you know how to fix it?
Thanks.
Do you mean you get a 404 when you click a cloaked link? If so, have you updated the permalinks?
Yeah, I updated permalinks.
Well, I don’t have any other bright ideas then. Care to give me a specific example of a link that doesn’t work?
a couple of things
i am noticing problems when using text link ads… specifically, the ads don’t work. I’ve tried updating the permalinks and everything, but when i click on a text link ad, it just hits an error page…
this could pose a big problem for people using TLA
second of all, i wish there was a way to cloak links on the blog roll….maybe not automatically, but manually in the wp-admin.. where for example, you can set ‘blogrolllink/aff?123″ to ‘mywebsite/blablabla’
I don’t know about text link ads, but for the second idea – try going to Manage – Cloaked Links, this might be what you’re looking for.
I don’t have any TLA ads (at the moment) on this blog, so I really have no easy way to investigate this problem. Maybe, if you have “cloak all links” enabled, it might clash with TLA… try setting it to “selective cloaking” and see if it helps.
text link ads provides users w/a wordpress plug-in so that they can sell context text links on their blog. So for example, an advertiser might pay you…oh i don’ t know, $4/mo (for example) for the word ‘cloaking’ in your post….
i’ve put link cloaker on selective cloaking for now
would it be too much work to create a drop down…or some sort of menu…in the link cloaker adminstration that lists all context links on a blog with a check box to let you cloak or uncloak? this way you don’t have to go through each post and manually cloak your links on ‘selective cloaking…’
just a thought
It’s doable, but a lot of work. I’ll keep your suggestion in mind but I can’t promise anything.
i’m also getting a 404 error. I’ve updated the permalinks and htaccess accordingly.
my wordpress version is 2.3.1
Please help me with this a.s.a.p
Thanks!
visit my site and click on a link in a post and you’ll see.
I looked at your site. I think the the problem is in the .htaccess. Where is your .htaccess located and what does it contain?
i fixed the problem, the redirect.php file had to be in another folder called plugins within the orig. plugins directory. ex. plugins/plugins/redirect.php
one more question, after a cloaked link is clicked, is there a way to cloak the url on the address bar? is there a plugin or script that can do this?
a close example I can give are links on phazeddl.com and how .tk domains cloak site urls.
It’s good to hear that you got it fixed, though it still is a bug – it shouldn’t require another folder.
I don’t know any WP plugins for cloaking the link in address bar, but I’ve seen various ways to do it in general. Frames (phazeddl.com uses an IFrame), JavaScript, etc. A quick Google search returns at least one free tool.
The easiest solution would be to modify wplc_redirector.php, remove the redirection code (the last 3 lines or so) and instead create a single frame that contains the target page. This should be easy for anyone who knows a bit of PHP/HTML, but you’re on your own here. I don’t intend to add this feature to the plugin.
Can you please help on creating a frame code.
I don’t know how to insert the html code into the redirect php file
Fine. Open wplc_redirector.php and go to the end of file. Delete all lines that start with “header….” and the line that says “exit()”. Then insert the below code after the “?>” -
That’s a very primitive version, but it should work. Not tested.
Hello,
I get this error. Visit my site for an example.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<’ in /home/halcyonr/public_html/3magin8/site/2/wp-content/plugins/plugins/wplc_redirector.php on line 39
This is the same problem I had before when I tried to do it myself. How do you insert an html code into a php file?
Thanks!
PHP code is between “<?php” and “?>”, everything outside these separators will be treated as HTML. You should be OK inserting HTML after the last “?>” in the file. It is also possible to output HTML (or something else) from PHP code by using the echo function.
Awesome plugin! Just what I’ve been looking for
Is it possible to tell the plugin to encode not only the post content but also a custom tag?
e.g. for ach of my blog posts I have a custom tag called ‘deeplink’ – how can I get the plugin to cloak this?
If the tag is added by another plugin and shows up inside the post when the post is displayed, you can’t really cloak it (at least not without some changes to the cloaking plugin… which might lead to new bugs).
Arrgh, I need more information to really answer your question
Is this tag part of the post or do you enter it in an additional field on the ‘Write Post’ screen? Also, if it’s added by a plugin, which plugin? It would be easier if I could look at the source code.
Hey, thanks for your quick response.
Yes, its one of the additional tags that you enter as part of the Write screen.
I am able to reference it in my templates using:
ID, “deeplink”, true); ?>
Looks like your code example got messed up; you should wrap it in <pre lang=”php”> … </pre> tags for it to display correctly (you even get syntax highlighting then).
Anyway, since you use it in your templates, there is no other way to cloak the links than to modify both the template code and the cloaking plugin. It’s complex, but doable if you’re sufficiently familiar with PHP and WordPress. I can give you a few hints on what to look for, but you’d be largely on your own.
This is the code I use to reference the custom field in my templates.
ID, “Thumbnail”, true); ?>
Any tips would be much appreciated!
php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "deeplink", true);
Hmm, is <pre> not allowed in normal comments? (It works for me, but then I’m the admin of this blog).
Okay, there are two things you need to do – rewrite the “deeplink” so that it’s cloaked and modify wplc_redirector.php so that it can recognize the links.
Rewriting the link : I’d replace your template code with something like this -
You can put something else in place of the “deeplink” text there, like “info”, “details” or whatever you want. This will create an URL that has the same pattern as other cloaked links, yet can be recognized and treated differently because it ends with a zero (normal cloaked links end with above zero numbers). This code should also gracefully handle the situation when the plugin is no longer active, falling back to uncloaked links.
Modifying the redirector : you’ll need to edit wplc_redirector.php for this, adding special handling for links that end with zero. This can be done in several ways… Look at the first if block, find code that looks like this -
I’d do it like this -
Well, that’s all. Unless I’ve forgotten something, or made some typos there (possible, didn’t check), it should work.
That worked a treat!
I owe you a beer
[...] can check this post for more [...]
ok, I’ve installed the plugin, and it seems to be working. yay! thanks for the work on this.
What I’d like to know is why your example on link cloaking, ie the how to be evil site, which is promoting a book, doesn’t have the amazon link cloaked to something that looks way nicer?…
oh, and could you possibly, in your copious spare time, do a single site step by step walkthrough? for all us noobs to the wonderful world of WordPress?…
thanks for the work!
That site isn’t mine, it’s just a random site that I found one day and liked enough to use it as an example here
I’m in no way affiliated with that website.
What do you mean with “a single site walkthrough”? Cloaking links on a site that isn’t running on WordPress? Or something else?
Thanks again for the help!
Happy Holidays!
I keep getting a 404 page. This is the page – http://www.smartgeezer.co.uk/2008/rip-curl-hells-bells-reversible-beanie-hat/ – permalinks has been updated, htaccess updated, I’m pretty sure I set it up right.
Also, the link doesn’t open in a new window, even if I add the relevant code to Line 90.
Any ideas?
OK, I’ve fixed the opening in a new window (had to remove nofollow in the Link Cloaking options) but not the actual link. It just tries to open the link – http://www.smartgeezer.co.uk/goto/link/68/1 – rather than converting it to the proper cloaked link.
I’ve looked at your site and my guess is that the .htaccess rules aren’t working. Can you post the relevant part of your .htaccess here? Anything between “# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN” and “# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS”.
Alternatively, email it to me at whiteshadow {at} w-shadow (dott) com
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule goto/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule goto/([^/]+)[/]? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
tx
Interesting. The .htaccess looks fine. What’s more, the redirector script itself works OK, as can be verified by visiting this link :
http://www.smartgeezer.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=68&link_num=3
Maybe the rewriting rules don’t get executed. Is that part of .htaccess before or after lines that look like this? –
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]The whole .htaccess which sits in the root:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^smartgeezer.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.smartgeezer.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule goto/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule goto/([^/]+)[/]? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
You beauty! You’re right, I moved the Link Cloaker stuff to the top and now it works.
Thanks a lot for your help and for this plugin.
Good
I’ve spend some time reading this article and I have to congratulate you for creating a WP plugin that’s doing this.
I’ve wrote a small article dedicated to easy cloaking methods using JavaScript and PHP for others that are not so good with programming
Link cloaking step by step guide
Fantastic plugin mate,
Thank you for releasing it!!!
Have a Great 2008
Hi, i wanted to use your plugin also. i uploaded it to the plugin directory, then, i activated it and updated the permalinks! but it doesn’t write any code in the htaccess file, so it doesn’t work!
can you help me? any idea?
do i maybe have to change something in the server admin menü?
I wouldn’t know about your server admin menus, but maybe you could try adding the code manually and see if it works? In most cases adding this to .htaccess should work :
The above code should probably be placed *above* any code that is already there.
doesn’t work
my version of wordpress is 2.3.1 as i think.
hmm… any other idea?
my htaccess now looks like this:
# .htaccess file create by vsa 3.2.9 webserver_rev 2.3
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Members Only”
AuthUserFile /vol2/home/k102184web/.htusers
AuthGroupFile /vol2/home/k102184web/.htgroups
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteRule more/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule more/([^/]+)[/]? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Eh, I forgot to mention to put your own option instead of “more” there; I think it’s “goto” by default.
Other than that, I’d check if the scripts are there (yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/) and if the redirector is actually getting called (check HTTP headers or something, if you know how).
I changed it to goto, but nothing happened! hmm… how can i check, if the redirector is called? ^^ i’m not such a pro
Well, a simple way would be to open wplc_redirector.php in a text editor and put something – anything – before the first “<?” string. Then click a cloaked link and see if the text you placed there shows up.
i put “roflmao
” before the first <?php and it appeard in the left corner of the whole website including the admin menu
I find that unlikely/strange. wplc_redirector.php should only be called when you click a cloaked link. Maybe you modified wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php?
oh
you’re right 
i modified the wrong file! ;D;D
but if i put it into the redirector.php file, nothing happens if i click on a cloaked link… he always says, that this page doenst exist oO
I think the .htaccess is to blame, because it doesn’t call the redirector… and that’s all I can say
If I was in a situation like this I would try to mess around with the .htaccess file, trying various things, to see why it doesn’t work. However, I don’t have a tutorial for that…
I met same problem with Christoph…:-0, hope I can find the solution soon….
a BIG fat thanks for this plug!!
Was going nuts because I had only 404s in the beginning, but found the solution in the comments here – maybe you can add it to the readme that the code in .htaccess has to be at the top – by default it is added in between and wordpress (2.3.2 on my site) adds the WP defaults to the end of the file again… so editing .htaccess manually seems to be a must.
Now just have to manually redirect the sidebar links.
All best and again THANKS for this one!
Good idea, I’ll add it to the readme.
pls try to find a solution for my problem =\
i need your plugin very much ^^
Eh, I don’t know. Maybe you need to put the plugin code before the authentication codes? Or something?… No new ideas :/
I put the plugin code on the top of the .htaccess, yeah,it works!! Thanks
I have seen this is a great one for a nice Wp plugins
Thank You..
[...] einfachste Methode ist meiner Meinung nach: Link Cloaking Plugin von W-Shadow. Einfach [...]
Seems still not working with wordpress version 2.3.3 any advice?..
Check some of the comments above. You probably need to move the plugin code in .htaccess to the top of that file.
[...] W-Shadow developed a Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress and is pretty much well-supported by its developer. I suppose it’s a nice alternative to other “affiliate link manager” (as they like to call themselves, but they’re just fancy words for masking or cloaking links! ) scripts out there, and it seems pretty easy to install, although from reading the comments it also looks like you need to meddle a bit with your htaccess file to make it really work well. [...]
[...] into a clickable link. You might want to use a link cloaking plugin for WordPress such as this : ø Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com ø Highlighting sales, special offers, discount codes etc should help especially if they are [...]
hey, nice and neat plugin. Thank you!
I’ve been trying this plugin here
http://www.hyperhigh.co.uk/orbounder-trampoline.html
but every click sends me back to the home page
Without the plugin activated it sends me to the right place – any advice is much appreciated!
I’ve looked at your page. The links redirect back to the homepage because the plugin can’t find the original (uncloaked) link in the post.
This can happen if the original link was created by another plugin, or if it uses some unusual code (as opposed to the normal <a href=’….’>lalala</a> way).
ah I see, yeah the post is pulling some of the information from a database using PHP so that could be the problem. thanks for taking a look.
Hi Techs,
i have a blog where i publish Freeware posts (http://www.telebajar.com) .
I am looking for a wp plugin to wrap
the URL´s to the download sites so that i link to a cloaked URL and i can avoid to have broken links to non existing download URLs (outdated)
a good example is sourceforge.net whre the download links and the mirros are always changing. Do you think this plugin will be useful for this?
Thank a lot in advance
Telebajador
You could use the static cloaking feature to do this. Alternatively, you could use a plugin that checks for broken links.
Hi
Trying out the plugin now and like it so far!
But one thing, is it possible to use it whitout the prototype js?
prototype.js is only necessary if you use “static” cloaked links – it’s used on the AJAX-y link editing screen. Other kinds of cloaked links – like those marked with <–cloak–> – don’t need any JavaScript.
Ok. Thanks for the answer, will try to take out the pototype then
And thanks again for a nice plugin!
I’m stupid hehe.. Did not manage to remove prototype..
Could I ask for som pointers in what to edit? If it aint to much
Thanks
Comment out this line:
in wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php. It’s around line 148.
There’s other stuff that could/should be removed as well, but the above line is the only one you need to remove if you just want to prevent the plugin from adding prototype.js inside the <head> tags.
I hope that makes sense
Woks like a charm! Thanks a milion!
Does the plugin work with 2.5?
I had it running on a blog using 2.3.3 but since upgrading its no longer working..
It works on the WP 2.5 blog that I tested it with, but you might need to update permalinks again.
Thanks, i update the permalinks and its working again.
Many thanks
Thanks for this plugin!!
Hey, great plugin you got here.
I’ve been searching for this like forever.
Installed and works like a charm.
One question though, can it parse or cloak the affiliate url on referral image ads?
If so, can you explain how to do this?
Thanks.
If the image ad is simply a normal linked image in a post or page, then yes, the plugin should be able to cloak it automatically.
If the ad is something complex, like Flash, JavaScript or an IFrame, or if it is located somewhere else – e.g. in the sidebar – then the plugin won’t cloak it.
I got some 125×125 ads on my blog, when you hover on them, you will see the url. So, I want to cloak those links, is that possible?
If not then I would have to create individual files and redirect the link manually.
I’m going to assume you mean they are not in your posts. In that case, you could use static cloaking for them. But yes, it involves some manual work.
Well, I thought static cloaking is already in this plugin as per your post said?
Thank, nevertheless it is still a great plugin.
It is. The “manual work” refers setting up each cloaked link separately
Edit: Okay, let me expand on that. You can go to Manage -> Cloaked Links and add any referral links that you want cloaked. Then you can get the cloaked URL for any of those by clicking the appropriate “show cloaked url” link on that page. Finally, you need to modify your image ads to use the cloaked URLs instead of the original referral links.
Hello I found your plugin page on the GFY board, the thread start with this post below. Does your plugin hide affiliate links from search engines and prevent the leaking of pagerank like this script below?
____________________________________________
Tip: Affiliate link redirects – Earn more money
It’s friday and im in a good mood so thought i’d share this little tip with for any blog owners/site owners that have a lot of affiliate links on their pages.
If you aren’t already redirecting them, well you should be and here’s how:
Create a PHP file with the following code and your desired affiliate code/text.
PHP Code:
——————————————————————————–
‘ http://www.realitykings.com/main.htm?id=fapgallery&p=clean‘,
‘college-fuckfest’ => ‘http://signupsb.triplexcash.com/cgi/click?account=560307&site=2&program=2′
);
if (array_key_exists($_GET['id'], $path))
header(‘Location: ‘ . $path[$_GET['id']]);
?>
——————————————————————————–
Save it as link.php
Then in your .htaccess file (create one if you dont have one) add:
Code:
——————————————————————————–
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^link/([/_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)$ link.php?id=$1
——————————————————————————–
Now in this example i used a realitykings.com affiliate link with the anchor text reality kings.
To include that link on my pages i would just add a link to:
http://www.domain.com/link/reality-kings
When clicked that will redirect to the sponsor link
Remember to block the /link folder in your robots.txt file
Benefits of this technique:
1. SEO benefits – google isnt fond of too many affiliate codes on landing pages and it also helps prevent bleeding or diluting of your pagerank score.
2. Prevent any pc tools or other malware stripping out or replacing your affiliate code.
3. Earn more money!
for example today’s nastydollars bonus day all i did was alter a few URL’s in the link.php file and now all my inthevip/vipcrew/ links all go through the reality kings tours.
Tomorrow i can just re-edit that file rather than the 100′s of hard coded links on my sites.
___________________________________________________________
Yes, the plugin can do that. It can add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to cloaked links, which will prevent them from passing PR. You can enable this feature by going to Options -> Link Cloaking and checking “Nofollow cloaked links”.
You could also do this by blocking the “link prefix” in robots.txt. By default the prefix is “goto”; it can be configured in the page mentioned above. This is basically the same thing the forum post suggests.
Any way to make it work with the alinks plugin? It cloaks all the links created by alinks, but often if a post got 2,3 identical links only the first one works and rest kicks you back to the root of the site.
Probably there is a way, but I’m currently not inclined to seek it out.
What should i add with robots.txt prevent the search engines from spidering those links
block them in robots.txt with:
User-agent: *
Disallow: ?????
If your link prefix is “goto”, you should add
User-agent: *
Disallow: /goto/
In general, the form is “Disallow: /link_prefix_here/”
[...] geen enkele credit naar mij, alle kudos gaan naar Janis Elsts voor het ontwikkelen van deze geli(n)kte Wordpress [...]
This must be in my top 3 of coolest and more or less ‘hidden’ plug-ins out there. After following the instructions of updating the Permalinks (just save settings in 2.5) and moving the code to the top of the .htaccess it worked like a charm.
I just had to dedicate an article to you. Thanks, great job!
Thanks
First of all I want to say great plug in. At first I had the 404. It was simply fixed by moving the lines in the .httacces file to the top of the file … works like a charm now
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule make_money/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule make_money/([^/]+)[/]? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
If your link prefix is “goto”, you should add
User-agent: *
Disallow: /goto/
In general, the form is “Disallow: /link_prefix_here/”
Thanks for your last reply,do i had to add Disallow: /goto/ ?
If i don’t add Disallow: /goto/ ?
What may happen ?
If you don’t disallow the links and don’t use the nofollow attribute on them, they (the links) will pass the mystical “link power”, or whatever they call it. That is, your links will (slightly) help the target website to rank better.
Whether this is good or bad for your own website is highly controversial, and I’m not expert enough to comment on that.
Thanks for your reply, i know some where google don’t like website with a lot of affiliate links : )
Hello,
The start out working great then the redirects started to fail. Here is the error in Firefox.
The page isn’t redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.
Any ideas of what it could be? Thank you for the your time,
Bert
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.
Want to say thanks again for the plugin, but nothing says thanks better than a donation.
Hey Bert, thanks for the donation
As far as I know, FF shows this error when a script redirects to itself several times, like in a loop. That should never happen with this plugin, but there’s always a possibility of a stealthy bug. Can you give me an example link that has this problem (so that I can investigate)?
I sent you an email with the details of the issue. Once we figure out what happen we can post the answer here for the benefit of all endusers. Thanks again!
[...] A Cloaked Link [...]
[...] out this post for more [...]
perfect plugin, working with every wordpress version since 2.5.1 for me.
This is a great plugin – thanks – but is there any way it can be modified to also mask links in the RSS feed? Can WP plugins even run on the RSS feed?
@Authcode – Yes, it probably can. I think you would only need to apply the plugin’s the_content filter to the_content_rss and/or the_excerpt_rss, too.
I don’t know if that makes any sense to you
@White Shadow – Not really!
But I’ll see what I can do (or break). Thanks again for a great plugin.
Thank You!!
The Plugin shows “could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”" in wordpress 2.3.1 ? is there any things have to be fix?
the problem occur here
WordPress database error: [Table 'localhost_name.wp_cloaked_links' doesn't exist]
SELECT * FROM wp_cloaked_links ORDER BY name ASC
any ideal ? tq
That SQL query is executed only on the static link management page, so it can’t be running at activation.
I don’t know what, exactly, causes the crash on activation, but apparently the required table wp_cloaked_links doesn’t get created. You could try creating it manually :
Here is a easy tool can cloak, even encrypt links.
FYR
http://Hide-Affiliate-Links.com/
@affboy – yay, shameless self promotion.
[...] expert Hi I am currently experimenting with the ‘link cloaking plugin’ available here: Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com It automatically cloaks all links barr your own domain by default. Thats from memory but pretty [...]
I’m running version 1.2.2 of this plugin which seems to have stopped working after I upgraded WordPress to version 2.6. Is anyone else getting this? All my cloaked links goto my blog’s 404 page – I’ve had to deactivate for now.
@Authcode – I had some problems with this, but I think updating permalinks fixed it.
@White Shadow – Managed to fix it by updating cloaking settings several times (strangely, didn’t work the first couple of times). I think the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin screwed my plugin settings when it tried to restart them all unsuccessfully after the upgrade. I’ll remember to check my links next time! Cheers.
I just installed the plugin on a couple of my blogs. The first blog the plugin worked great. The second one I had some problems with it. It was interferring with my other plugin “ALINKS” … a plugin to create links to certain keywords. I couldn’t figure out a way to fix the plugin for this page so I just deactivated it because I need the alinks plugin more… If you have a fix for this I’d love to hear about it!
Otherwise great plugin!
@Jeff – It might be possible to make both plugins work together, but the links created by ALINK wouldn’t get cloaked anyway.
Yeah, the links from ALINKS were getting cloaked correctly… However, all the links were off by 1. Meaning…. If I had three links in the page… the first link would direct to the second, the second would direct to the third and the third would direct to the associated tag.
Is is possible that this plugin can cloak urls in comments and custom fields (of posts)?
Found the solution to cloaking custom fields in the comments, thanks. Could’nt find anything regarding cloaking links within comments.
@Ash – Not at this time; not in the foreseeable future either
Thanks White Shadow, i’ll try and find another way around the comment links.
I’m having difficulty cloaking banner ads i’m running from custom fields, your previous ‘hack’ for custom fields worked a treat where i had a plain url to cloak but can this be modified where the url is included within banner code in the custom field?
Here is an example of the code (links removed) that i include in a custom field called banner468
@Ash – It’s doable, but would take a lot of thinking/hacking. I’m not up for it at the time, sorry.
If you want to give it a try yourself, you could use the $url_pattern regexp to extract the URL from the banner and then modify the previous hack to handle these additional URLs.
and what about an option to automatic link insertion to a given keyword instead?
@Hugo Santos – There are already other plugins that can do that
However, most of them would have compatibility problems with this plugin, unless you use them to insert “statically cloaked” links.
@White Shadow –
Hi White Shadow,
I put your plugin onto my website: http://nguyenngocminhhanh.com/
But when clicking on cloaked link, it redirected to not_found.html.
Could you please take a look and help me work out?
Thanks
@minimaus – Looks like the plugin isn’t executed when you click the link. Have you updated the permalinks after setting up the plugin? If yes, check the .htaccess file and make sure the “cloaking”-related rules (they should be marked as such) come before the main WordPress rules.
Addendum : I looked at your site more in-depth and it appears you are not using “fancy” permalinks. Might it be because mod_rewrite isn’t supported by your host? If that’s the case then this plugin will not work on your site.
@White Shadow –
Many thanks. Could you please give me a recommendation of a script, plugin that overcome this host limitation.
minimaus
@minimaus – I don’t have any specific recommendations, but you should be able to find something on Google.
@White Shadow –
How the .htaccess file look like?
Mine like this:
# -FrontPage-
IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
order deny,allow
deny from all
# BEGIN WordPress
# END WordPress
@minimaus – Try adding these three lines between the lines that say “Begin WordPress” and “End WordPress” :
I’m not 100% sure it’ll work, but it could make the plugin function correctly.
@White Shadow –
Big big thanks to your helps, White Shadow, even it turn out that the host do not support this plug-in. Maybe i would consider to change to another hosting service.
bigmaus
I’ve tried getting this plugin to work in WP 2.51 and am NOT having success. I followed the suggestions about the .htaccess file but still the links get sent to my 404 page.
I could not find a place to “update permalinks”. In settings/permalinks the only option is to update the settings. I’ve tried clicking that to no avail.
Mod rewrite IS available on my host.
My blog is in a “blog” folder and I’ve tried putting the .htaccess in the root and in the folder.
Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
Wally
@Wally – The wording on the options page has been changed in newer WordPress versions and it doesn’t say “Update Permalinks” anymore; anyway, saving the settings should be enough.
Just to clear this one up, the .htaccess file needs to be in the directory that the blog is installed in (or your post permalinks probably wouldn’t work).
I would guess that the plugin-related .htaccess rules are incorrect in your case, most likely either in the prefix or path; I can’t provide any more details without knowing your directory structure and plugin configuration.
WS,
My blog path is just domain.com/blog/. Then it is the normal WP setup. The path to the linkcloaker plugin is \blog\wp-content\plugins\link-cloaking-plugin and I have it set to the default settings for now.
There wasn’t a .htaccess file in the /blog directory so I just created one with the 3 lines mentioned below in a post between the # START WordPress and # END WordPress. BUT… after trying to get the plugin to work the .htaccess file disappears. I guess WP must be deleting it.
So, maybe there is another conflict and this won’t work on my blog.
Thanks anyway.
Wally
@Wally – Hmm, let me guess – you’re using the basic “?p=xyz” permalinks for your posts, right? In that case WP doesn’t need the .htaccess file and might be deleting it when you update permalink options (just a guess, I have never seen WP actually do that).
But still, if you create the file manually and put the right lines in it the plugin should work. The challenge might be getting the rules right when doing it by hand.
By the way, have you tested if you can access domain.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php in your browser? If the plugin is correctly installed in the default location that file should redirect to your homepage (not 404).
WS,
No I use the custom permalink: /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
When I try to go to the file domain.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php, I just get “Index of /blog/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin”. It doesn’t list any files but all three php files are there.
Wally
@Wally – AFAIK permalinks beginning with index.php still don’t use .htaccess/mod_rewrite.
Ahhh, it’s already past midnight in this timezone and I can’t think of anything else useful
BTW : There is a way to tell if the plugin actually gets executed when a cloaked link is clicked – it generates a HTTP 301 response and adds a “X-Redirect-Src” field to the header…
@White Shadow – I don’t see any extra text in my 404 page when the link doesn’t work but I use a custom 404 page.
I notice my SocioFluid plugin doesn’t work when the link cloaker is turned on. I guess I’ll just leave it alone for now since there seems to be several confilicts or problems.
Thanks again.
Wally
@Wally – Web browsers don’t normally show HTTP headers anyway. You’d need a special program or a FF extension to see them…
Hi,
Thank you for the great plugin. I got a question though.
How to make the link to “link cloak” under manage menu hidden from user other than admin?
In wordpress under the manage menu, all links from other plugin are hidden except link cloak when I log in as a normal user.
Thank you.
@Waldo – Okay, I’ve change it so that only users who can access Manage -> Links can get to Manage -> Cloaked Links as well. You will need to download the plugin again.
@White Shadow – Hi, thanks for the quick reply.
It works like charm.
[...] Thanks, I found this plugin for wordpress that looks promising: (hope this type of link is ok) ø Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com ø [...]
Hi White Shadow,
I have install plugin into my website. Unfortunately, my webhosting regularly change my .htaccess file so cloaking links send people to 404 error file.
How can i configure plugin so whenever the .htaccess change, the plugin is just inactive ?
Thanks for great plugin.
dinhnq
@dinhnq – I could modify the plugin to check .htaccess before cloaking the links, but doing it on every pageload would hurt the blog’s performance. Maybe if it checked every 1000 requests or so?….
[...] Link Cloaking There is a free WP plugin which you can get here: Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com I can’t vouch for it in any way as I use a different, more comprehensive (paid) plugin, but it [...]
Hi! I installed this plugin and it seemed to be working, at least on links that didn’t have subid’s appended to the end of affiliate links.
So I deactivated it, and reactivated to see if I could get it to work with affiliate links, but then it just shut down the whole site and all pages would just go straight to the home page.
Any idea why it would do that? I had to remove the code that it added to .htaccess to get the site working again. And now I can’t put it back because the site messes up again. (Hope that wasn’t too vague…)
@Rip – The plugin redirects to the homepage when it can’t find the original URL of a cloaked link. This is most often caused by a conflict with another plugin. Specifically, plugins that add new links to posts can cause this issue.
@White Shadow –
Thanks, White.
I have another question. If I copy post including my cloaked links to a forum e.g. http://abcde.com/goto/Here_to_go/257/10.
when a click on forum links happen, does this count for my website http://abcde.com/ or forum website.
i thought it would count for my website because the cloaked links need to be decoded into original affiliate links via my webhost. Is it true?
If yes, can the affiliate agency track down the original of the click. Some programms are very strick to the registered website, some are not.
Regards
@dinhnq – I’m not sure what your definition of “count” is in this context, so I’ll make a wild guess you mean to ask can the affiliate company find out that the visitor came from a forum.
The way they (the company) might be able to do this is by checking the referer – a particular piece of info that is sent along with each request by most browsers. Would the referer field show the forum or your site? The answer is I’m not sure. I ran a few quick tests and it appears that it will show the forum, but I can’t guarantee that is correct for cross-domain redirects (as in your case). Also, the behaviour might be different between various browsers.
Overall, I think there is a non-zero chance they would be able to find out.
I try to cloak all my download links on my membership website, but when ever i click on it to download an ebook or a file in general, it just gives me an error message. Can you cloak links of download link address. Like for ex: http://www.domain.com/lol.pdf and whenever it gets cloaked, and i click on that link its givs me an error message, back to 404 error page.
hi, i have a membership site, where iw ant to cloack all the download urls. I activated your cloack plugin, and it worked cloacking all the links, then later i notice when i click on a download link like http://www.domain.com/link-plugin.exe thats cloakced, it will bring up a 404.error. How can i fix this? I also, notice the rewrite rule disappear in m7y htcaccess, whenever i update permalinks
Hi, first off I love the plugin. Everything works except one feature. If you can tell me if its a setup problem, or it just cant do it that would be great.
Masks and nofollows links in posts and pages no problem
What I wanted was to mask/nofollow links in the sidebar as well. Currently it does not do this on my site. I tried creating a static link under “cloaked links” and then adding the masked url to the blogroll, but it just loops back to the same page instead of going to the external site.
The best feature would be if you could select a tick box when creating a link through the standard WP interface as to whether cloaking applies.
Can you let me know if the plugin does this? Or a work around?
Much appreciated
@Peter – The plugin doesn’t cloak links in sidebars, or in fact anywhere else outside of post/page text.
Creating a “static” cloaked link and adding it to the sidebar should work though. Does the “masked” link work if you simply copy & paste it to the address bar?
@White Shadow – Thanks, at least Im not going crazy. Yes the static link works when pasted into a browser, but not as a normal link added under the blogroll.
Just to be clear:
If my affiliate link is http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=113187&U=96317&M=16188
And I create a static cloaked link as http://www.forex-trading-systems.com/goto/Automated Forex Trading/
I put http://www.forex-trading-systems.com/goto/Automated Forex Trading/
as the link in the blogroll, it just seems to redirect to the homepage.
Is that the right way to do it?
Do static cloaked links in the sidebar work for anyone else?
I may restore my original .htaccess and reinstall the plugin to see if that helps.
Thanks for your help
@Peter – Hmm, maybe using a cloaked link that doesn’t contain spaces would help? There’s a chance there might be a bug in the plugin that could cause problems with spaces in URLs.
Ok figured it out right after I posted the comment!!!
its because I had spaces in the static clocked link “/Automated Forex Trading/”
Did it again with “test” as the name of the static cloak and works fine.
If your code could add hyphens where spaces are, that would fix it for nubes like me in future. I added another no follow plugin http://blog.andrewshell.org/ and that has sorted it for me.
If you could add the simple features of Andrews nofollow plugin, I think it would be complete.
Of course thats just some suggestions and really greatful for what you have done so far.
@Peter – I’ve modified the plugin to replace spaces with dashes as you suggested (note that this only applies to new links – existing “cloaked” links will not be updated by the plugin). You can re-download it from the same link.
I won’t merge in the nofollow plugin though. It may be simple, but it’s not entirely relevant to the plugin’s main functionality
Man that was fast. Thanks again.
Nice plugin. I tried it and for some reason, the redirect wouldn’t happen for a few minutes. I tried again later and it worked. I am not sure why.
I set it up to cloak all link but a feature that would be nice is to be able to add a piece od code in my posts/pages to exclude links I don’t want to cloak. ie. ?
Also, that would be great if I could use the cloaking feature with ads in my sidebar. Maybe for a future release?
Thanks
Sebastien
@Sebastien – Hmm, maybe I’ll add some kind of tag to exclude specific links (someday).
There have been several suggestions to make it cloak links in other places (sidebars, footer, etc), but at the time I just can’t think of any practical way to do that. If you have just a few links in the sidebar you could manually create a cloaked link for each of them in Manage -> Cloaked Links.
I’ve suddenly started getting 404 errors with this plugin. Been trying to track the problem but not having any joy yet, is anyone else experiencing problems?
@Ash – The plugin hasn’t been modified for a while, so it seems unlikely it would be the source of the problem. Have you made any changes to your server configuration, or installed any new plugins lately?
@Ash – Ah traced the problem to an entry i made in the htaccess which conflicted with the rules of the plugin.
Hi – This is a problem-free plugin on several sites I have. Thanks!
But, there is an exception – all I get is 404 errors (on my own site) when cklicking cloaked links on scrapbookinggems.com.
The only config difference I’m aware of from my other sites using Link Cloaker is that on this site I have restructured my Permalinks, using a combination of Dean’s Permalinks Migration and Permalink Redirect – latest versions. I’m running WP 2.6.3.
This config was in place before I tried using Link Cloaker. I have remembered to update permalinks, with a writable .htaccess. .htaccess is updated with the Link Cloaker redirects.
I’ve also tried entering the Link Cloaker’s /goto/ url in the exclusion list for Permalink Redirect, but this makes no difference.
Any suggestions?
Ken
I was using your plugin for a while but it stopped working. I wish I could remember what the problem was now but I ended up paying about $100 for a link cloaker because I’m so used to people not supporting their plugins. Now I see that you are still actively involved here so I’m sorry I didn’t report the issue sooner in detail because maybe it could have helped you here. Unfortuneately I don’t remember now exactly what it was doing except that the link cloaker stopped working. Sorry.
[...] first two autoblogs… 1)Is there any advantage to using GoCodes over my link cloaker of choice, Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com ? I ask because for some reason the titles of my posts aren’t getting cloaked, although on the [...]
@Stephen – Well… what can I say? Life goes on
@Ken – Check your .htaccess again. The plugin’s rules need to be above WordPress rules in the file, otherwise you might have problems like these.
Sorry for not replying earlier – your comment got caught by the spam filter.
thiiiiiiiiiiiiks man for this very great plugin you saved my ass:-)
It works 1000%
It works great, I like it but the problem is the plugin only redirect to original website, can you masking the link so if visitor go to my link likes http://www.domain.com/go/cloaklink and visitor still see the link at browser not the original link.
Thank you for the plugin, It works 100%
@Andri – It could be done, but not in this version.
[...] Affiliate Link URL’s? There is also various link cloaking plugins for wordpress available. Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com [...]
You are awesome for sharing such a great plugin with us! Thanks!
Hi =)
I’ve been using this plugin on many of my sites and I love it – thank you!
Problem – today I upgraded my first blog to WordPress 2.7 and now ALL my cloaked links are broken.
Any insight?
I sure hate to have to go wandering the web to find all the places I put these cloaked links…lol!
Your help would be most appreciated!
Thank you!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
@PotPieGirl – Oh, I guess you probably need to check the .htaccess, see if the link cloaker code is still there and update permalinks if it isn’t.
I’ve upgraded to WP 2.7 too and the cloaked links still work fine.
@White Shadow –
Oh, THANK YOU!!!! Something so simple and it worked like a charm – AND saved me a ton of work!!!!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
@PotPieGirl – Glad to help
Would be nice to have. “Cloak all links except tagged with ”
@Mario – Yes, yes…
Thought I’d mention. I just started a wordpress 2.7 blog. I used the link cloaker plugin but it wouldn’t work.
So I resaved my permalinks and it worked fine, anyone having 2.7 problems should try resaving permalinks. Got the tip above, thanks.
Hi… AWESOME PLUGIN!
Works great… I just thought I’d mention that I also use Blog Mechanics Keyword Linker Simply because it is not case restrictive and adds a “no-follow” to the links. (http://www.dijksterhuis.org/wordpress-plugins/keyword-link-plugin/)
However, I notice that Link Cloaker won’t cloak the links that BM Keyword Link generates… any thoughts on that?
@Michael Smith – As a rule, this plugin won’t cloak links generated by other plugins. This is because it would be very hard to detect those links.
[...] sites that will either be flipped, or that I want to keep separate from my main sites, the free Link Cloaking Plugin is a brilliant [...]
first of all: thank you for the plugin!
is there a chance to use wild-cards in the “cloaked links”?
merry christmas!
@Marc – I’ll add that to the idea list
@White Shadow – Nice!
I use this great plugin but some links createt with the plugin AmazonSimpleAdmin doenst work. They only link to my Site.
How can I fix this?
AmazonSimpleAdmin is from here: http://www.ichdigital.de/amazonsimpleadmin
Please help me
Hi Everyone
anyone else having problems with the plugin and the new version of wordpress? I just noticed that all my links inside my posts are not working anymore so I had to turn off the plugin.
Let me know if anyone else is having this problem.
Thanks
Edson
@Edson – As someone suggested a few comments below, try updating permalinks again. That should help.
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin: Özellikle bol dış link verdiğiniz sitelerde veya affiliate programları tanıtımı yaptığınız sitelrde link adresini saklaması nedeni ile çok faydalı. Tek eksiği istatistik tutmaması ve aynı başlık altındaki terimlere ortak bir link belirleyememesi Umarım ileride bu özellikler eklenir. [...]
@ YourDealz.de – I repeat : no, this plugin won’t cloak links generated by other plugins. This is not a bug. It simply can’t be done in the current implementation.
White Shadow, thank you for a great plugin. I have it configured and working on my blog, now I am having a weird problem on another blog I am configuring. Is it possible that it works properly with some WP themes but not with others? For this new blog I am configuring I decided to use AjaxBerlee theme and it doesn’t work with it. If I select some other theme it appears to be working fine. This theme uses AJAX, so the URL doesn’t always change in the address bar when you navigate posts and pages of the blog. Clicking on any external cloaked links gives me a page not found message. Any thoughts?
I’m guessing the theme uses some non-standard mechanism for loading posts and the plugin can’t figure out which post/page is currently visible, leading to invalid cloaked links. I’ll take a look at the theme tomorrow, but can’t promise anything – analysing other people’s code usually isn’t easy.
I ended up using a different theme. I just wanted to give you heads up and I was curious what you think might be causing this. I think using these AJAXy themes could hurt my SEO ratings anyways, that’s why I switched themes.
Ahha, I actually didn’t get anywhere with that theme. And I agree that AJAX is probably bad for SEO.
Great help, thanks.
Plugin tested with WP 2.7 and it works though you will need to update the permanent link tab once you have upgraded to 2.7.
The plugin looks great, but I have slightly different requirements. Can you point me to a plugin that would actually CHANGE the outgoing links (not just cloak them for the user) to links pointing to my own domain?
So basically I’m blogging using an RSS feed and the posts contain lots of outgoing links. I’d like these links to be changed to http://www.mydomain.com/link-1234.html or something which would then re-direct users to the actual page. I’m guessing this would have some SEO benefit by not having too many outgoing links in the posts.
Is my logic here wrong, or is there a plugin that does this?
Thanks!
I think your logic is a bit confused, yes.
You want a plugin that will rewrite all external links to look like internal ones. However, when the user clicks on such link, they should be redirected to the actual external page. As I see it, this is exactly what Link Cloaker does (except the URLs don’t end in .html).
Or did you perhaps mean that you want a plugin that would create actual HTML pages that contain nothing but a meta redirect/Javascript redirect? IMHO that would have no SEO benefit and would look weird from the user’s perspective.
If your main concern is SEO and having too many external links, just check “Nofollow cloaked links” in the plugin’s configuration. This way the cloaked links won’t “count” from the search engine’s perspective.
Plugin tested with WP 2.7 and works just fine.
Still there is a problem with the images. Let me explain.
I use two plugins for them.
jQuery-Lightbox(http://www.pedrolamas.com/projectos/jquery-lightbox) and Add Lightbox (http://mdkart.fr/blog/plugin-add-lightbox-pour-wordpress/)
The Add Lightbox plugin automatically adds the rel=”lightbox[ID_OF_THE_POST]” to images linked in a post using the code href=(‘|\”)([^>]*).(bmp|gif|jpeg|jpg|png)(‘|\”)(.*?)>(.*?)/i. BUT it cannot do that since they have already being cloaked.
Any way of getting the lot working in harmony/
Thanx in advance. Great work
Your cloaker works fine for affiliate links in the posts. However, I noticed that the affiliate links are NOT cloaked in the side widgets.
How can I do this?
Thank you,
John
@ uhubuhu : That’s a bit hard to fix properly in the current release. As a workaround, giving the cloaking hook a later priority might help. To do that, open wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php and on line 38 change the 2 to 20. The new line should look like this :
@ John : Currently this plugin can’t automatically cloak links in widgets. However, you could create “static” cloaked links (Tools -> Cloaker Links) and use the cloaked URLs in the widgets.
This plug in looks great! Does it also have click tracking so you can track how many people are clicking your affiliate links?
@ Todd : Yes, but only for “static” links, i.e. automatically cloaked links aren’t tracked.
Hey. I’m having a bit of a problem with the plugin on WordPress 2.7. I’m trying to cloak my links in the side bar. I’ve used the static cloaking tool and have manually copied and pasted the links into the blogroll, but I get a 404 error when clicking on the links. Any ideas?
Most likely it’s something to do with .htaccess rules. Do automatically cloaked links work (in posts)? If not, update your permalinks and ensure the cloaking-related rules are near the top of the .htaccess.
@White Shadow – Thanks! Totally works. And also, thanks for the quick reply.
[...] Link Cloaking: Automatically cloaks outgoing links in your posts and pages. You can also add static cloaked links manually. [...]
works like a champ. I have 2.7 and it worked without any refreshing. Thank you for this simple yet invaluable plugin.
Hi,
I’m having trouble with the Link Cloaking plugin. I have tried every way but I only got 404 pages from the links.
I have wordpress 2.7, PHP Version 5.2.2 and the following plugins installed:
All in One SEO Pack
Easy AdSenser
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google XML Sitemaps
My Category Order
Sociable
WassUp
WordPress Database Backup
WP-PostViews
My .htaccess file:
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule goto/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule goto/([^/]+)[/]? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Would be very grateful if I could get some expert help.
Sincerely
// Daniel
Looks like your wp-content folder is in a different location than the plugin expects (this is probably a bug). For now, you could try changing two lines in the .htaccess like this :
I’m not sure if the forward slash is required before “wordpress”, so try removing it if still doesn’t work.
Hi White Shadow,
Thank you for your fast response, really good support =)
Now I saw that there were two .htaccess files on my server. One in the root and one in the /wordpress folder. When I updated the permalinks in wordpress admin it was the only the .htaccess in the root that was updated with the # Link Cloaker code.
So I copied the code and paste it into the .htaccess file in the /wordpress folder and now it works perfectly. I wonder how it is that I have two .htaccess files?
Best // Daniel
No idea about the two files; but it’s good that you got it working
Yes, thank you again. What a wonderful plugin.
How can you tell if your link is cloaked?
Thanks
Darrel
Hover your cursor over the link and look at the status bar. If the link is cloaked, you will see an URL that points to the current site. However, the link will actually lead to a different site when clicked.
[...] Link Cloaking PluginExcellent plugin to cloak outgoing links in your posts, pages, sidebar, etc… (see my woothemes goto-links in the sidebar) [...]
Love the plugin but I’m having a pretty serious problem, I’m #1 on google for a particular search phrase but when you click on any of the links on this site or any others I have that are using this plugin you go nowhere and you get 404 errors. However it works perfectly fine if your using Mozilla Firefox and click any of the links they are operational and take you exactly where they should. Internet explorer on the other hand, has none of them working, bringing up 404 errors. How in the world does this work only using firefox and on none of the other browsers?? How can I fix this so it works on every one of them????
Thanks in advance for your help,
Dave
According to my own tests, the cloaked links work in IE, Chrome, Opera and Firefox. As far as I know, there is no credible reason why they wouldn’t work in any particular browser – with the possible exception of some kind of bug/malware in the browser itself.
Thanks for your quick response on this. I’m still trying to figure out how I got this to work for firefox but not IE or the others it works with. I’m thinking that I may have coded it wrong in the html for it to work in IE.
Can you give me an example of how it should look like in raw html code, so I can be sure I did it right and used proper coding??
Let’s say my site is pooltables.com and I want to hyperlink link some text, like billiard balls for sale, and cloak the link that’s going to another site within that linked text. Would you show me what that should like in raw html form please or rather how it should be written?
Thanks again for your help with this!
Dave
* With dynamic cloaking :
* With static cloaking :
Go to Tools -> Cloaked Links and create a new cloaked link. Then just use the cloaked URL that will be provided by the plugin in place of the original URL. The cloaked URL will look something like this : http://yourdomain.com/goto/yourtext/ , so you would use that address in your posts.
Thanks so much for your help with this! Have a great weekend!
Hey you Plugin not support wordpress 2.7
It does support WP 2.7. If it’s not working, the most common reason is you need to update the permalinks (see the post above).
Curious. Is it possible to automatically cloak links in the RSS feed as well as in a post?
Or, better yet, *not* cloak links in the post, but cloak them in the feed?
Reasoning – I am using some article directory articles in my blog. I can’t cloak those since it is a TOS violation. But, my feed could get scraped, and I’d like *those* links to point back to the actual article on my blog. Or something like that. Plus, although I am leaking some PR in the post itself, I’d rather not leak more of it in the feed.
I’m pretty sure that in the current implementation it also cloaks links in the feed. Your suggestion has been noted.
[...] Link Cloaking [...]
This is a great plugin and going to be real help in a new project of mine, thanks.
I just have a question. For security I have a different wordpress address to my blog address i.e.
WP Address: http://www.domain.com/wp_folder/
Blog Address: http://www.domain.com/
As the functions are using the siteurl to build the redirects my wordpress address appears instead of my blog address for the cloaked links. I’ve tried changing ‘site url’ to ‘home’ and adding the wp_folder to htaccess but haven’t had much luck. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Tricky. The rewrite rules generated by the plugin are not actually fully compatible with WP 2.6, so editing them might be tricky, too.
Anyway, I’ve uploaded a new version that could fix your problem. Maybe. You will need to update permalinks (to regenerate .htaccess) after installing it.
Excellent! That worked a treat, just had to append the worpress folder name to the path in the .htaccess and it worked.
Thanks for going to the trouble of looking at it
[...] if you use a WordPress Blog there is a good plugin for cloaking affiliate links, called ’Link Cloaking Plugin for Worpress’ (surprisingly!) which you can download for [...]
Hi, I’ve just installed the plugin and the cloaking looks to be working but it’s not redirecting – just goes to a 404. I have updated the permalinks and I’ve also tried altering the directories in the .htaccess to see if it makes a difference but no luck so far, this is what I currently have in the .htaccess file
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule goto/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule goto/([^/]+)[/]? wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
The .htaccess looks fine at first glance, but it also appears you don’t have the latest version of the plugin (1.2.6). Download and install it again, then update permalinks, too. The latest version uses slightly different rewrite rules that should be more compatible with some non-standard WP installations.
[...] [...]
What is No Follow cloaked links?
This option inserts the
rel="nofollow"into the cloaked links. Nofollow’ed links are ignored by search engines, which can be sometimes useful for SEO purposes. You might nofollow a link if you don’t want search engines to count it as a “vote” for the linked site.Maybe I missed the whole picture here, but if I write an article in wordpress and I’m linking to an affiliate, I just link whatever text I like with the affiliate url. How does this plugin do anything different than that? I would like to hide the url when I get to my affiliate! Did I miss something? I’m probably too dumb to understand the difference.
When you use a normal link the user can hover the cursor over the link and see that it goes to an affiliate site. With this plugin, the link will look as if it points to another page on your site (e.g. “yoursite.com/goto/1/2″).
However, the user will see the URL of the affiliate site when he actually goes there. If you want to prevent that you’d need to open the link inside a frame, which is currently not possible with this plugin.
Hi
Just installed the plugin and it works great. However, I have an issue. I want the destination url to NOT reveal the affiliate link but just to show the merchant’s url. For example, if I cloaked http://www.clickbank.com/aff?3 to http://www.abc.com/goto/clickbank/, when I click on the cloaked link, it brings me to the merchant’s page with my ugly affiliate link showing on the browser url. This is the part that I’m most worried about in terms of aff hijacking. Is there a way to have the destination url to not show the aff link but just the merchant’s url?
THanks very much
Txn
Not really. Only the merchant him/herself can implement this – they could use a redirect to go to record whatever aff. data they need and then send the visitor to a “clean” URL. It’s not hard to do but many sellers just aren’t that tech savvy/don’t care.
Alternatively, there’s the frame idea I posted about above, but it’s not implemented yet.
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin [...]
Great plugin! Thank you! One future suggestion that would be great is to be able to categorize the statics links (i.e. I’d like to basically reproduce my categories list into the static links so that I can easily find the ones I need.)
Hello again! I just posted yesterday, but I have a question. Is there any way we can edit the affiliate link without having to delete the old one and re-add it?
Sorry, that’s not possible in this version.
I’ve downloaded the plugin and, while it cloaks the affiliate banners, it doesnt cloak the affiliate banner ads.
Can I just confirm that it only cloaks the ads and not the “javascript” ones too?
Cheers
Ignore the above as the use of html has made my post confusing!!!
I’m trying to find out if linkcloak will cloak script language javascipt banner ads, as it doesn’t appear to do so with my site?
Cheers
It doesn’t cloak javascript ads. In fact, I suspect there is no way to cloak script-generated ads efficiently unless you write a custom cloaking script for each ad service.
Having some problems with the pluing in WordPress 2.7.
When plugin is activated, I find I am unable to upload images, add catergories or tags. Deactivating the pluing allows it though.
This could happen if the plugin outputs an error message when loaded during an AJAX request. I’ll need to know the error message to fix it, but extracting the message from the AJAX stuff can be a bit tricky.
Personally, I’d go with a HTTP sniffer and examine the traffic manually. But that might be overkill in your case, so here’s something simpler to try – check your WordPress directories for
error_logor similarily named files. In many server configurations PHP errors are recorded in these files, so you may find the error message in there. Check the root directory, wp-admin, and the plugin’s directory.i’m getting the same 404 errors with that this guy is, on the latest 2.7.1:
February 20, 2009 at 15:08
Hi, I’ve just installed the plugin and the cloaking looks to be working but it’s not redirecting – just goes to a 404. I have updated the permalinks and I’ve also tried altering the directories in the .htaccess to see if it makes a difference but no luck so far, this is what I currently have in the .htaccess file
—-
i did everything according to your directions. I had this issue before and fixed it but I don’t recall what I did to make it happen.. Can you assist? Thx for this killer plugin.
Can you post the relevant part of the .htaccess here? It would be much easier to figure it out if I knew what the rewrite rules look like for your site. (You can also email it to me at whiteshadow [at] w-shadow [dot] com if you don’t want to disclose this information publicly)
sure, and thx..
# BEGIN WordPress
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule out/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule out/([^/]+)[/]? http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Hmm, everything looks fine and the URLs are correct, but it still doesn’t work. Let’s try this : replace the plugin’s rules with these :
Thx for your help.. my programmer is in now and he fixed it.. i’m not sure what he means, but I figured i’d post it here anyways in hopes you can make sense of it or it can help someone else… thx for your help earlier though, great plugin my man!
—-
in .htaccess before Link Cloaker rules was:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^to/(.*) http://$1 [R=301,L]
So Link Cloaker rules didn’t work, I removed this.
——
Oh, if that code was before the cloaker’s rules then I’m not surprised the cloaker didn’t work. The above rules would intercept and process all URLs before the plugin would have a chance to do the redirect.
Hey, I want to add some instructions to the robots file to disallow the links which your plugin created. Whats the best way to do this?
May I suggest an alternative first : if you enable “Nofollow cloaked links” in plugin’s settings then search engines will treat them just as if they were disallowed in robots.txt.
If you want to go the robots.txt route, something like this should work (replace “goto” with the cloaked link prefix you use on your site) :
Hey thanks for that. I feel kinda stupid….I had already checked the no follow box previously…
This plugin is great though and excatly what I needed. Do you have plans to keep this updated? People like you are what WordPress is all about.
Well, I usually fix bugs as soon as possible, but new features are added rarely.
Perhaps I should start selling this plugin (as in, for money), then I’d have a big incentive to keep improving it. Most other cloaking plugins are commercial already. I’m not quite sure users would appreciate a move like that
Hi,
This is a great plugin and it works great for links within my posts but it does not seem to work for any other links. I have a template that has a modified single.php file that pulls a link from a custom field. Do you know if there is any way to get these links to be cloaked as well ?
Thanks
Matt
Just to add….
This is the link that falls outside the “main post” within single.php
ID, “custom_link”, true)): { ?>
ID, $field_name, true); ?>
<a href=”"Check Latest Price
Whoops … that didn’t show properly.
ID, “custom_link”, true)): { ?>
ID, $field_name, true); ?>
<a href=”"Check Latest Price
Sorry… I am in danger of spamming these comments. (-: How do I add code to these comments ?
Use the <pre> tags when posting code. E.g. “<pre>…code…</pre>”
That said, you can’t really cloak links outside posts. The feature has been suggested a few times before, but I still haven’t gotten around to implementing it.
Edit : And it wouldn’t be as easy as just dropping a quick hack into the code. Unfortunately
Thanks anyway. I thought this might be the case after reading through other comments. I figured out how to incorporate the link within the post so problem solved. This is a fantastic tool. Many thanks
Hey White Shadow,
thanks for the good work.
I have one remark though. It seems your plugin doesnt work with wp Super Cache
Really? I’ve been using WP Super Cache on this site for months and so far the plugin seems to be working fine. E.g. the example link in the post above (“A Cloaked Link”) redirects correctly when I try to click it.
Could you paste your .htaccess? Do i have to put Linkcloak b4 or after Wp Super Cache?
It’s after WP Super Cache but before WP core rules in my .htaccess :
Thanks for your plugin. Unfortunately I’ve moved to a new host which doesn’t support mod_rewrite. Is there any chance that this plugin would work with a .htaccess file?
That would require pretty large changes in the plugin. I’ll add this to the list of possible improvements, but it’s unlikely to get implemented in the near future.
this is a great plugin
it will be more helpful if the links page is paginated and an option to edit cloaked links, Thanks
hi, im having difficulties with this plugin. every link i attempt to add goes to the same page regardless of the url i have entered. it was working fine for the first 5 or so links. i didnt add any plugins in this time. Do you have any ideas how to fix this, it is driving me nuts. Any help would be very much appreciated.
Do you mean the “static” links? What page are you being redirected to (i.e. is it your homepage, or a different link you added before)?
not the static links. origionally it redirected to my homepage but now it is redirecting to the last link i was able to put in to an external site.
Interesting. I went to check your site, but it looks like you’ve just reinstalled WP. If you still have these problems I’d like to see an example post where the incorrect redirect happens.
ok mate ive reinstalled and its just going to the homepage from the links now, however the first link i put up worked but the links i put after that all redirected to the page of the origional link!? i have deleted these links and now if you check my homepage you will see links that return to the homepage, so i really dont know what to do. i would appreciate any advice you can offer me
think ive cracked it mate, iits directing to where i point it, thanks for responding
[...] you would have to create many files. An easier way to cloak links with your blog is by using a link cloaking plugin. Visit that site to learn more about [...]
hi
great plugin. work like a charm here.
one improvement would be great though….for people who manage a lot of aff links…maybe some bulk option or csv import?im thinking here about static link cloaking.so i can setup up more cloaking links then one at the time..i think csv would be working great, in one column wp cloaked links in other aff links.what do you think?
Okay, noted that in my huge idea list. Might get implemented sometime this century
Cool!take your time
I figured out it can be easily achieved “manually” by importing csv file into the cloaked_links table in mysql using phpadmin.works great!
thanks again for your plugin and have a lovely day!
chujeck&cipka
Hi, i am using the plugin and it works great, i was wondering if there was a way to add an option of doing a _blank for the window. Can i open any plugin file and add it there on my own so that all link open in new window. thanks
[...] Problem loest das Link Cloaking Plugin fuer WordPress. Es schreibt automatisch alle Links oder nur markierte Links in einem Post um und [...]
Not sure what to do on this install step:
Go to *Options -> Permalinks* and click *Update Permalinks*. This ensures the plugin’s link redirection code is added to WordPress .htaccess file.
I’m running 2.7.1 and don’t know where the “*Options” is. I went to “Settings/Permalinks”.
What shoudl the .htaccess look like after the update?
Thanks,
Neal
Hi, sorry to ask but im not sure whats happening with the plugin. It does not cloak my text links and they wont click through. If you look at my homepage you will see this, however, it does cloak the last couple of text links on the page. I hadn’t checked to see if the links were working for some time so i dont know when this happened or why. i have tried deactivating all other plugins and it appears they have no impact on this problem. Any ideas?
Ok, so it appears that your plugin does not cloak html text links from affiliate windows deep linking tool. I have just made them myself to overcome this. Not sure if this is just a problem with my site? anyone else had the same difficulties?
I’m guessing the deep linking tool is a plugin, right? The cloaker doesn’t work with links that are dynamically added by other plugins; this is by design and not easy to change.
I might change this eventually, but currently there’s no workaround.
@ Vicky :
Yes, you can edit the wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php file and insert this code before line 102 (the one that says “return $link;”) :
@ Neal :
Indeed, “Settings/Permalinks” is the right page in WP 2.7.x. The .htaccess file should contain a new code block that begins with “# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN” and ends with “# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS”; the actual rewrite rules will vary depending on your blog’s configuration.
The code should be above the WordPress’ own code in the file.
Thanks White Shadow… it worked
So back to the instructions “Go to *Options -> Permalinks* and click *Update Permalinks*. This ensures the plugin’s link redirection code is added to WordPress .htaccess file.”.
I go to Settings/Permalink Settings and the only button is “Save Changes”. I don’t get what I’m supposed to do here. Does just clicking “Save Changes” do something magical if I don’t change anything on the screen?
So my .htaccess is not getting changed. It simply contains this:
# BEGIN WordPress
# END WordPress
So I went to Tools “Static Cloaked Links” and it build this link:
http://freecsharptutorials.com/goto/LearnVisualStudio/
I put that link on the home page for you to see as “Test Link: Learn Visual Studio”.
It gives a 404 page not found.
So what am I missing here?
Thanks
Neal
Yes, it should update the .htaccess even if you don’t actually change anything. It worked that way in older versions and it works on my WP 2.8-bleeding-edge install, so most likely that’s not the problem.
However, your .htaccess looks suspiciously empty; did it really contain just those two lines, or did my comment filters eat the rest?
Yes, the .htaccess is empty except for the two lines that start with the pound sign.
Is there something I can manually type in there to get this up and running?
I’m still confused how clicking “Save Changes” would know how to update the .htaccess file.
Thanks,
Neal
Ok, if I change the Permalink Settings to “Day and Name”, then the htaccess is updated and the cloaking works fine. However, if I change it back to “Default”, then the .htaccess goes back to the two line file. So it appears that the Default settings don’t work with the cloaking? Is that correct? Or a new issue?
Thanks,
Neal
Oops, so it appears WP will ignore plugin-created .htaccess rules if you set the permalinks to “Default”. I’d say this is a WP bug.
For now, select any other permalink setting to get around this problem. Hopefully I’ll be able to add a more transparent workaround to the plugin … eventually.
hi there, can you tell me how I can cloak links that dont appear in the post body – but are part of custom keys added to each post? I see the plugin reads through the actual body of posts and pages etc – but I have constructed my aff links using custom keys – and am calling them in the single post page.
I cant add static cloaks for all my links, so how do I get this to work?
oh – and just to add, im sure its pretty important – im trying to cloak a link which is an image – NOT text.
how can I do this in single.php (I am using custom keys as mentioned in my previous post)
Short answer : Can’t be done.
Long answer : A feature like this has been suggested several times, but I’m presently too lazy to update this particular plugin. I’d need to completely rewrite the cloaking algorithm to let it support cloaking arbitrary custom fields.
That said, if you only wan’t one specific field then it’s doable (but not easy). You might even find some relevant code examples in one of the older comments here. Basically, you need three things :
* A piece of code that grabs the link from the custom field and displays it in a special cloaked form (e.g. http://example.com/goto/custom/field_name/ ).
* An appropriate rule in .htaccess that ensures wplc_redirector.php will be called when a link like that is clicked (you can use the two existing cloaker rules as a starting point).
* Modify wplc_redirector.php to fetch the field name from the request, load the post in question, get the field value and redirect the user to that URL.
Good luck
hi, thanks for the reply, im afraid all of that is way above me and wouldnt have the first clue where to start (regardless of your tips
) if anyone can help me out – in terms of supplying instructions or code, that would be great. Im using a standard name throughout all posts for the custom key (deeplink) – and it never changes
fingers crossed
This is a seriously awesome plugin!
Thank you sooo much!
@ sebastian If you want to exclude a category you can replace some code in wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php and leave the include on page unchecked.
Its just my simple hack, Its probably not the best way to do t, but saves time.
Replace:
function content_filter($content){
if (is_page()){
if(!$this->options['is_page']) return $content;
}
else if(!$this->options['is_post']) {
return $content;
};
with:
function content_filter($content){
if (is_category(‘YourCategoryslug’)){
if(!$this->options['is_page']) return $content;
}
if (is_page()){
if(!$this->options['is_page']) return $content;
}
else if(!$this->options['is_post']) {
return $content;
};
[...] Das Link Cloaking Plugin von und Janis Elts kann automatisch alle Links oder nur bestimmte Links “versteckt” werden. So können zum Beispiel Links von Partnerprogrammen “getarnt” werden. Das Plugin ist getestet bis WordPress 2.7.1 VN:F [1.2.3_620]Bitte warten…Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast) Bookmarks setzen: Diese Icons verlinken auf Bookmark Dienste bei denen Nutzer neue Inhalte finden und mit anderen teilen können. [...]
Hi
I have been using the link cloaking plugin successfully in the post body etc. However I would like to use it in the sidebar as well using a text widget. I haven’t been able to get it to work so far. Is there a way to do this.
Thanks for your help. Roger
At this time, you can only use static cloaking in the sidebar. That is, manually create a cloaked link in Tools -> Cloaked Links and then use the cloaked URL in the widget.
Das sollte man beachten!!
Links in der Sitebar werden mit diesem Plugin nicht gecloakt.
Downloadlinks die z.B. auf eine externe zip Datei zeigen, funktionieren gekloakt nicht mehr.
Wer solche Links in seinem Blog anbietet, sollte die Funktion „einzelnes cloaken“ wählen.
I ‘m using piwik.
How to track outlinks from link cloaking?
Now, no track link cloaking in actions –> outlinks by piwik
[...] redirect. For each cloaked link I use a plugin called Link Cloaking Plugin. You can get it here: Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com Once it has been installed I cloak all links I want to use and then place the cloaked link in any [...]
[...] you use WordPress, there is a good plugin for cloaking affiliate links, called ’Link Cloaking Plugin for Worpress’ (surprisingly!) which you can download for [...]
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin by Janis Elsts ‘Tis a dastardly contraption for fooling your visitors into thinking your [...]
[...] Affiliate link cloaking with WordPress I am using this one on a WP 2.7.1 install Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com Perfect and [...]
cool plugin. i heard this is one of the useful plugin for seo purpose
I’ve been using this plugin for a while now and it’s always worked well.
This week I had to re-install my site due to a plugin crash (not yours) and when I re-installed the Link Cloaker all my links started to go to my most recent post and not to the merchants page.
I have had to de-activate the plugin now so as not to lose sales but do you have any idea what has gone wrong?
Phil…
You probably need to update your .htaccess with the cloaker’s rules. To do that, go to Settings -> Permalinks and click “Save Changes”.
If that doesn’t help, open the .htaccess and make sure the plugin’s code is at the top of the file. It’s the part that begins with “# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN” and ends with “# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS”.
The first suggestion worked perfectly. It’s something that I know I should have thought about but you tend to panic and think it’s something else though.
Thanks for your help.
Phil…
Does this problem have issues with sub-domains in urls (other than www)? Everything is working perfectly except for some rover.ebay.com urls. I’ve put echo’s and var_dumps in strategic places within the script to see what goes where, and the rover.ebay.com urls never even get to the rewrite_link function. Could this be a regex issue (which is like a foreign tongue to me)?
Boy, I fat -fingered (or perhaps fat-brained) that post. Change “Does this problem” to “does this plugin”.
I don’t think sub-domains are the problem here – in fact, a link pointing to “http://rover.ebay.com/” gets cloaked just fine on my test site.
Could you post the full HTML for one of the problematic links (i.e. the entire “<a href= …. </a>” code) so I can test it myself?
Hi J – ,
Editing this behind a password…I have Ad boxes for my affiliate marketing. Pulling my hair out trying to get this to work. Here is a live demo of the WP Theme I’m using: http://www.gabfirethemes.com/demos/blognews/.
I have ads placed in the header, footer, the right sidebar (iTunes one) and the top Ad Spot 125×125 box so far. None are cloaked although I’ve got the Plugin installed.
Do I need to design a widget for this to work? I’ve tried to use the cloaked URL in the code that I need to upload, but that doesn’t work.
Do I need to go “static” or use in the affiliate code?
thanks for your help.
Michael
The last sentence should read….
Do I need to go “static” or use “” in the affiliate code?
I didn’t put quotes around “cloak” and it disappeared!
In this case you should use the so-called “static” links which can be defined in Tools -> Cloaked Links. Enter your normal affiliate URLs in that tab and then click on “show cloaked url” to get a cloaked URL for each link. Then use those cloaked URLs in your ads.
Hi
I have been using your plugin for some time and it works really well in posts and pages.
However I need to create a cloaked link in the sidebar. I have created a static link under Tools/Cloaked Links. However I am not sure exactly where or what to put it in my code in the sidebar.
Have looked on this site for some examples but haven’t seen any so far.
Can you please provide a couple of examples? That would be really great.
Thanks, Roger
Just use the cloaked URL (the one you see when you click “show cloaked url” on that page) in the same way as you would use the original affilate link. There is nothing more to it.
Static Cloak did not solve the issue I’m having. I know it is not the plugin though. Trying to cloak some Amazon Affiliate html code, for example the hypothetical below. This is the entire html code.
Tried cloaking the following:
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=gigfy-04&o=1&p=26&l=ur1&category=kindle&banner=8675309ad=ifr
with and without the question marks and several other variations.
To make things more challenging, when you do a “mouse-hover” the redirect shows “http://www.amazon.com/andsfkadskfa;sldkjfaksjdf;kajsdf” which I’ve also tried to cloak.
Do I need to create a subdomain or subdirectory for this? I’ve tried a simple .php script where it went something like:
mydomain/index.php?title=new page name
where “new page name” ‘cloaked’ the above html code from Amazon.
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say. This may be because some HTML code was automatically stripped from your comment. If you want to post code, try surrounding it with <pre></pre>
Did you try to cloak an entire HTML code block using this plugin? That would not work; the plugin isn’t designed for that. It only cloaks links, or – more specifically – URLs. It doesn’t deal with link titles, HTML code, JavaScript, Iframes or anything else like that.
If the hypothetical HTML code contains an URL, you could take that URL, make a cloaked version of it, and modify the HTML to use the cloaked URL instead.
Will you at a later time update the plugin so it will work inside your template aswell?
That will be awsome and im sure your donate button will get 100% more used
I’ve thought about it, but it would be very tricky to do and probably cause conflicts with some other plugins like WP-SuperCache. Perhaps someday
[...] [...]
Rick,
All the way from http://www.internetmarketingforums.net.
This is great information. You have a knack.
Just a shout out and will give it a tweet too!
mike
[...] [...]
[...] Link Manager [...]
i dowloaded your plugin sometime ago and im using it all the time. its great so far so thanks a lot for it…now here comes the question:there is a simple tracking implemented in this plugin, it shows you how many times cloaked link have been clicked.unfortunately it shows you overall number of clicks for a link…what if i want to see how many clicks were made daily?so lets say i have these 50 links, i would like to see some kind of general DAILY summary how many times links have been clicked.i know it may be too much to implement it in the plugin but maybe you have some idea how to track it using some analytics or other tracking plugin…i was trying to figured it out but wasnt luck yet…any ideas would be much appriciated!
so how do you daily track your cloaked links?anyone happy to help?
I think there might be a way to do it with Google Analytics. The “/goto/” (or whatever prefix you have) should look like a normal directory to GA and thus the details should be available in GA -> Content -> Content Drilldown. Unfortunately I can’t test this myself, as I have very few cloaked links on this site.
If it doesn’t work right away you can probably force GA to track those clicks using something similar to the code that this plugin uses to track outgoing links.
Does anyone get an Internal Server Error when the plugin is activated? Mine does and I don’t know whats wrong.
thanks a lot for your fast response.
ga doesnt track /goto/ at least for me…its something to do with “outbound” links (although your links are outbound as they are cloked they seem to be inbound)
Unfortunately /goto/ doesnt show in content drilldown…i tired to find it there before and no no
so tehre is a solution for outbound clicks and you kind fo mention it…you need to tag all your links with onclick parameter.The problme is that i have quite a lot of cloaked links all over the place, and tagging them manually seems like a waste of time. i havent tried oratranslplant plugin yet, i was trying to do the same with yoast – ga for wordpress plugin that is supposed to tag all outbound links automaticlly but it seems it doesnt like links your plugin create…so i dont know really…i thought you may have some solution you are using yourself or other people figured out how to do that. ill try plugin you mentioned and see what happens.thanks anyway!
You might also be able to adapt this script for your needs.
I am having a similar problem to Your Netbook above, but the solution seems to be different. I have resaved the permalinks and the code appears in the htaccess file as it is supposed to (code appears below). The links are cloaked in the status bar, but when you click one, it redirects to my homepage.
Does it matter that the affiliate links use this format already?:
?url=
(as in this CJ affiliate link:) http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-(feed-id)-(my-aff-id)?url=http://www.merchant-site.com/
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule goto/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/? http://tickets-below-face-value.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule goto/([^/]+)[/]? http://tickets-below-face-value.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
The plugin redirects to the homepage when it can’t find the original link in the source post. Links in the “?url=” format should be fine (I checked).
This problem usually happens when the link is added by another plugin. Does that give you any clues?
Thanks White Shadow. I think it might.
I am using ExecPHP, which allows me to put php inside the post and executes it for me. The affiliate links are generated dynamically by the php script inside the post or pulled directly from the database.
Any way to get the cloaker to work anyway?
This has been a common request and will be added in a future version. However, that version may very possibly be commercial.
Hi,
Please can you help.
I have spent many hours trying to get the link cloaking plugin to work.
I have read all of the recent forum posts and have done all the things that are talked about. Updated permalinks , checked htaccess files they are all OK and still no success.
I have tried creating posts in two different domains that I have. One is on wordpress version 2.8.1 and the other on 2.8.2. They have different themes – one is dateless sniper and the other is on Semiologic. But there is no difference.
I do not know which way to turn next. When I am creating a post should I be able to see the cloaking process within the link because at the moment the link just looks like a normal link when viewed in the html window.
I await your comments.
So what exactly doesn’t work? Is it that links don’t get cloaked, or that they don’t redirect properly?
A cloaked link will look the same when creating or editing a post. The actual cloaking happens when the post is displayed on the blog (this should also work in the post preview, if you use that).
If you can’t get any links to cloak, check the settings page – maybe you’ve got selective cloaking turned on when what you really want is the “cloak everything” option. Or maybe the exclusion list contains something that it shouldn’t.
[I got your email, but couldn't respond to it - my email got bounced with a "No such user" error message. So I'm posting my comment here.]
Ah, I see.
However, that behaviour is *by design* – it’s supposed to show the
original URL in the address bar when you actually visit that page. The
cloaking is currently only useful to hide the destination of the link from
people browsing your site and, say, hovering their cursor over a link to
see where it leads – not for fooling those who actually click the link.
I’m currently working on an improved version of the plugin that will have
the option to display the linked page inside a frame, which would create
the effect you desire.
How exactly do you make his plugin work, when you have fancy permalinks. Please help.
Generally you just have to update your permalinks (click “Save Changes” on the permalink settings without actually changing anything).
[...] first commercial WordPress plugin later this month. The plugin will be an improved version of the Link Cloaking plugin and will include a bunch of new and exciting features, like cloaking links anywhere on the site (as [...]
Hi,
Does your plugin work with WP 2.8.4? I just upgraded and I think the plugin no longer works. My cloaked links now show 404 pages
Yes, 2.8.4 should work fine. You probably need to update your permalinks again (and check the .htaccess to make sure the cloaker code is above the WP code).
Hi,
I’ve rechecked my htaccess and nothing wrong there. Why I think it doesnt work with WP 2.8.4 is because I have 2 sites, one is WP 2.7.1 and the other I upgraded to WP 2.8.4.
The one with WP 2.7.1 is still working fine. The one with WP 2.8.4 is NOT
I also have a site on another server and this one also the plugin failed to work after I upgraded to WP 2.8.4.
When I meant fail, it means Failed to redirect….so ends up with a Page Not Found (404)
This site also runs on WP 2.8.4 as well, so I’m quite sure the plugin should be compatible with it.
Could you perhaps email me your .htaccess and site URL? Maybe that would help me find some clues. My email is whiteshadow (@) w-shadow (.) com
I realised a “bug” in your script. If the URL has an space inside the link wont be cloaked.
@Marco : Fixed. You can download the updated version via the download link in the post above.
It would be nice if you can extend your plugin with “link cloaking in comments”!
Hi. Me again.
I left a comment a few weeks ago about how the plugin was not cloaking rover.ebay.com stuff on my blog (although it seems to be working for everything else). Well, over the weekend I upgraded the plugin to 1.2.7 and now it’s working again. Not sure why it stopped, but things are ok now. Except…
Now sure if you recall, but at one point I asked why the plugin didn’t seem to function with my version of the_excerpt_reloaded (I say “my” version – it’s essentially unchanged other than I overrode the defaults in the plugin). I am forcing the plugin to display an excerpted version of the_content.
Question – it’s pulling the content as $post->post_content? Does that pull the content before your plugin has filtered it?
Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
The cloaker filters the post in the “the_content” hook. If the excerpt plugin deals with $post->post_content directly (without calling the aforementioned hook), the cloaker probably won’t catch the post and thus won’t cloak it.
Try modifying the excerpt plugin so that it calls
before it outputs the excerpt. Obviously you’ll need to replace “$excerpt” with whatever variable the plugin uses.
Hmmm.
Right before
return $output;
I added
$output = do_action( “the_content”, $output);
Now all I get is titles (no excerpt). Did I misunderstand?
My mistake, it should be apply_filters(“the_content”, $output). do_action is almost the same thing but it doesn’t return any output.
That did the trick. Thanks!
However… I have a new problem. I have 2 links on the same page that (should) point to the same destination. The first one looks like:
/goto/visit_the_product_s_homepage_/4561/1
That one works
The second link, which is associated with an image looks like
/goto/link/4561/2
That one does not work. It just goes back to the blog’s home page. I tried to remove the /link part but that made no difference.
Any ideas?
I’ve uploaded another update; maybe it will work now.
I downloaded the release. It still seems to work the same. Here’s some clues (I hope).
I turned off the plugin completely. All (original) links worked as expected. When I turned it back on, the same thing as reported earlier was happening. The first rewritten link was working, the second with the /link in the URL was not.
Now, here’s the weird part. That particular post had a URL in the post plus a linked image. A similar post, that only had a single linked image, worked just fine. And, that linked image also had the /link in the URL.
So, it would appear that it’s not the /link that is throwing everything off, but the /2 that is doing it.
Well, the plugin will redirect a cloaked link to the homepage when it can’t find the original URL in the post. In this case, although it found and cloaked the image link at first, for some reason it couldn’t find the link again when it was time to redirect the user to the target page.
This usually happens when one of the links in the post is created by another plugin. Does that ring any bells?
Hmmmm. I see where you’re going with this. Yes, there is a plugin that adds the first link when the post is rendered. So, in the rendered post your plugin finds 2 links, but in the original version of the post there is actually only one.
The two displayed links are actually identical, but the link cloaker apparently just counts links regardless of what it finds.
I’m not entirely sure how to handle it other than just drop the automatic insertion of the first link.
OK. So, I tested it out. You were correct. Does this mean that any modifications to templates could have the same result?
Links inserted via template manipulation wouldn’t get cloaked at all.
Stuff like this will be fixed in the “Pro” version – among other things, it will be able to cloak any link, regardless of how it was added and where it’s located – but that version will be commercial (though the price will probably be relatively modest).
Will it be handled via database in the Pro version? Or some other mechanism?
Any thoughts as to when pro might be available?
Yes, all the links the plugin encounters and needs to cloak will be stored in a database. That is, both the automatically cloaked links and cloaked links that are explicitly defined by the user will be stored in one place. The analytics will be slightly improved, there will four or five redirection mechanisms, etc.
This version should be feature-complete and usable in a week or so, but I’m not sure how long the other stuff associated with this release will take – e.g. updating documentation and maybe even coming up with something akin to a sales page.
[...] You can download the plugin and get more information here: WordPress Link Cloaking Plugin [...]
Hi, me again. Got another “mystery” for you (or, maybe it won’t be for you
.
I have some feeds that are posting to my blog. One of the links won’t cloak. You can view the format of it in the website link I posted.
Anyway, it is formatted as
http://www.avantlink.com…………..&url=http://www.fetchdog.com……..
Since it is the only type of link I have that has two domains inside the url, I’m wondering if that is throwing the cloaking off?
The URL shouldn’t matter, unless it’s invalid. I tested the cloaker with URLs that contain two domains and it worked fine for me. Can you show me the full URL, or, better yet, the entire <a href=….>…</a> tag?
It looks like this
http://www.avantlink.com/click.php?tt=pl&ti=81&pw=19885&mi=10081&pt=3&pri=20319&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fetchdog.com%2Fpet-supplies%2Fdogharnesses%2Falldogharnesses%2Fskull-bones-harness-narrow%2FA10009N
It still cloaks correctly in my tests. Maybe it’s not the URL itself but rather something in the tag that’s causing this? Is the URL properly quoted? Are there any additional parameters in the tag, like rel=”nofollow” or target=”_blank”?
Hmmm. I copied and pasted it as it shows up. When I view the source, there are no other tags associated with the href. I dunno – I’ll put some echo’s in and see where it’s dropping out. Maybe there’s another filter that’s doing something before it gets to the link cloaker.
Your plugin works fine on my site. everything except the affiliate link I have placed on the sidebar – on the home page. I think it may be because there is a configuration page for the theme that I am using which allows be to place the image location and re-direct link. I have set to cloak all pages by default. I tried adding at the end. did not work. any help? thanks.
The plugin doesn’t currently cloak links outside of post content (e.g. sidebars, comments, page header of footer). But due to popular demand, this feature will be added in the next version.
I am having the same problem with 2.8.4.
I have checked the .htaccess and the code is above the wordpress code.
I am getting 404′s aswell – does it conflict with phplinkdirectory?
I’m not aware of any conflicts with that plugin. Have you tried deactivating phplinkdirectory temporarily and seeing if you still get 404 on cloaked links?
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress [...]
Hi,
I use the plugin about a year but never had cloak a link from ebay.
After having made it the plugin crashed and will not let me delete the link with the cloak i had before.
I uninstalled the plugin and reinstall again and everything was equal. I can no longer use the plugin at this site.
Someone can help me.
Regards
Unfortunately this version of the plugin doesn’t delete the saved cloaked links when you uninstall it. You need to manually remove the link from the wp_cloaked_links table in your database (this can be done with something like phpMyAdmin).
If you could post the eBay link here, I might be able to find out why it crashes the plugin, and fix the bug.
I just have to thank you for writing such a great and simple to use application. More people should know about this. I have spent hours and hours trying all sorts of cloaking plugins, you name it I downloaded it and isntalled it.
Basically every single plugin for wordpress I have tried and yours is the best.
The only flaw was that it didn’t open links in a new window, but that simple code that White Shadow posted does the trick, and it wasn’t scary at all to do. Phew.
Thanks again, great job.
OneMoreGadget
Now if I could only find a plugin that automatically fixes typos…ahem.
hello,
What can i do by custom_fields?
When i mouse over the link it is cloaked, but I get a 404. I deactivated all plug ins and still get 404. Any ideas?
Do you have a caching plugin installed? It might be serving the old cached version of the page.
Try going to the target (uncloaked) URL directly; maybe it’s simply down?
Sidebar links would be nice
Other than that, a nice handy plug-in.
That’s possible in the premium version of the plugin
Hi White Shadow!
I am very curious about the premium version of Link Cloaking. Just one question as I am currently using the free Link Cloaking Plugin with manual cloaking: can I just switch to the premium version with auto cloaking or are there any preparations neccessary I should be aware of?
That depends on what you mean by “manual cloaking” :
If you mean using the <!–cloak–> tag to specify which links get cloaked, then you can just switch to the premium version with zero hassle. The new plugin is backwards-compatible and will continue to cloak the tagged links.
If you’re referring to the “static” links feature instead, there will be one additional step necessary after you’ve installed the premium version : you’ll need to go to Tools -> Cloaked Links -> Named and click the “Import” button to import those links in the new version’s database.
In general, the update process is intended to be as painless as possible, but if you have any problems you can always ask me
I am using WordPress 2.8.4. I have set up a new site with just a home page and one post, but when I click on this post it seems to default to the home page and that’s the URL that is shown. I have set up test posts so that I have several and they all do the same thing. I have tried the suggested remedy of putting the code above the wordpress code in the .htaccess file, but still the only page displaying is the home page, no matter which post I click on. And, whenever I update my permalinks the code is reinserted in its original position below the wordpress code, so that I then have the code both above and below the wordpress code.
I have deactivated all other plugins and reverted to the wordpress default theme and this problem only occurs when your plugin is activated. The plugin does cloak my affiliate links, but it seems to be diverting all post URLs to the home page.
I love what this plugin does – do you have a solution for this problem?
Seems like multiple users have been having this problem recently, but I haven’t been able to reproduce it on my own site(s). Could you give me the URL of your site in question so I can run some tests? You can send it via email ( whiteshadow@w-shadow.com ) if you don’t want to reveal it publicly.
Thanks for looking into this. I’ve sent you an email.
We installed your excellent plugin but the cloaked links all open in the same window. We want the links to open in a new window or tab instead.
We are using the “Cloak All Links” option, because editing the thousands of links in all our posts would be unworkable..
Is there a way to have them all open in a new window or a new tab?
Not in the free version, sorry.
Have dropped you an email as I’m getting the 404 error aswell!
Actually cancel my help, like a plonker I didn’t read all the “Read Me” file and hadn;t manually updated the .htaccess file. It all works OK now
Oh well, I’m glad that it works. Please disregard my email that I sent literally five seconds before you posted that comment
If I were to use the default which would cloak all links… some of my links are inserted for better seo (anchor text links to internal pages) would google still see them as anchor text links?
Internal links are excluded from cloaking by default, even if you use the “Cloak all links” setting. You would have to remove your domain name from the exclusion list in Settings -> Link Cloaker to enable internal link cloaking.
But to answer your actual question – yes, I think they would still count as anchor text links even if they were cloaked.
None of the sites I put in the exceptions box are excluded, including my site. What should I do? I really like that feature.
Excellent plugin, thank you! I had trouble with it at first, but after reading through some of these comments I realized that, like a previous commenter I had not read the ReadMe file and so hadn’t updated my permalinks. Once I did that, everything seems to be working beautifully! Thank you for a great plugin!
[...] your intention is to cloak a link, why not use link cloaking software instead. There is an excellent free link cloaker for WordPress from White Shadow. (He even provides a much extended premium link cloaker with many more [...]
I’m just learning my way around wordpress, heard about your plugin and installed it.
A friend pointed out to me some time later that my links were all nofollow. After searching high and low in the theme files, I figured a plugin was to blame – this one.
In the exceptions box, I have all three versions of the domain. And yet, when I create a link inside a post to my home page, that is, just my domain name, it gets a nofollow tag. When I link to another post, it does not.
I tested it by deactivating the plugin, removing the link to the domain, reinserting a link to the domain and checking the page source. No nofollow tag. I removed the link, reactivated the plugin, reinserted the link, checked the pg source – and there it was, a nofollow tag.
Apart from the exceptions box, which I have already made use of, I don’t know what else I can do. Is it a glitch?
You could uncheck the “Nofollow cloaked links” box in the plugin’s settings.
Also, do the links that are nofollowed incorrectly actually work when you click them? If not, what URL do they show?
Thanks for the quick response! . . . I thought of that, but I’d prefer to keep them nofollow. I also checked to see if the links worked before I wrote the first time. They all went to my home page.
I did some more testing, and I got it to work. But . . .
Even though the domain, in all three forms, is in the exception box, it is getting cloaked as if it were an affiliate link if I choose to add alt text and set it to open in a new window (using the link button in the visual view).
If I simply type in the url, it does not cloak and does not add the nofolo tag.
So that’s where the glitch seems to be.
The problem is with setting it to open in a new window. I do that and it gets cloaked and nofolo. I tried adding just the alt tag and that worked fine.
This sounds similar to a problem that another user had. It should be fixed in the latest version of the plugin; download it here.
Thanks! I’m going to update it now and see if that fixes it. The one and only good thing about my procrastination problem is that I didn’t have much content on my site to sift through. (The bad thing, is I didn’t have much content…lol) Anyway, I’m just glad I got rid of all those nofollows.
[...] Cloaking Plugin Mit dem “Link Cloaking Plugin” kann man entweder alle oder nur extra markierte Links “verstecken”. Dafür [...]
I also installed this plugin and like it. But there is a little problem: it isn’t working for all links. Most link work as they should but there are a few that simply redirect back to my front page.
I think there is a bug in the regexp? Could somebody maybe take a look at this?
Could you give me an example? Post the URL of the page where you have the problematic links here, and I’ll take a look.
I suppose I won’ be able to post more than one URL here without being blocked by a spam filter so I send you a mail with some example URLs.
Maybe this has been asked before but will it automatically cloak rss feeds that are pulled into a web site? I got it working for my regular links but not rss feeds. That would be great if it did.
I’m guessing the RSS feeds are pulled in by a plugin. Unfortunately, the free version of the cloaker doesn’t really work with links created by other plugins. You could try the premium version, though
So, are you saying that Eclipse Link Cloaker will cloak rss feeds? If so, I’ll buy it.
Yep.
(To be completely honest : I haven’t tested it with an RSS feed plugin. I’m 99% sure it’ll work, but if it doesn’t, I’ll give you a full refund.)
OK, I took the plunge the other day and purchased Eclipse Link Cloaker because of the rss feeds I use on a lot of my sites and so far so good! There are a couple quirks or options I’d like to see built in but it does what it’s suppose to do and does it well. I can suck in feeds to my sites and the links look like they are part of the site. Sweet! I’m actually thinking of promoting Eclipse Link Cloaker as an affiliate. Anyway, that’s my review if it helps. Thanks.
Great, I’m glad it worked for you.
What additional options would you like to see? I’m generally very open to feature suggestions.
Well the one option that would be nice is to be able to shut off the cloaking for the blogroll (or links) widget. I post links to authority sites to show search engines that my site is not all about me
. Maybe it would be easier to tweak the code in wp rather tweaking your plugin. Either way, I still like it and it was worth the purchase.
Regards
Well, you could add the link domain names to the exception list (in Settings -> Link Cloaker).
Duh! You’re right. That’s what I’ll do. Thanks.
I am brand new to setting up wordpress sites. I see there are lots of challenges people have with the process, and yet I have been told this is quite essential for affiliate marketing. Is there a dummy proof way to PLUG IN or dummy instructions? Signed WP DUMMY
See Managing Plugins for detailed instructions on how to install plugins. You could also browse around the rest of WordPress Codex a bit, there’s a lot of useful information in there.
This plug-in rocks! Only wanted something to cloak my links and have my domain name first then the affiliate link come after. Just what I was looking for.
However, none of my sidebar links are cloaked. Is it possible to do that?
Thanks,
- Marc
The free version only cloaks links in posts. However, there’s a premium version that can cloak links in any part of your site, including the sidebar
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin [...]
I’m having trouble getting the plugin to work – it’s installed fine and I think I’ve configured it correctly, updated .htaccess etc.
When clicking on a cloaked link in the format “http://domain.com/goto/link/12/1″ I just get my 404 page.
Any ideas?
Take a look at the .htaccess and make sure the plugin’s code is at the top of the file. The cloaker’s code block is marked by the comment “Link Cloaking Plugin BEGINS”.
Perfect thanks! WordPress had added it’s own code above the plugin code.
Your free plugin works great, and I think I would like to purchase your paid version.
But I noticed on the free version that even though my links appear cloaked when you click on the link and are redirected to the affiliate page, the hop link appears in the URL.
Does this still happen with the paid version? It would be nice not to display any affiliate info.
Thanks
Billy
The paid version supports several different cloaking types, including one that lets you also cloak the address bar URL. You can find more information about the cloaking types on this page (scroll down to the “Cloaking Type” section).
[...] [...]
Thanks for this plugin, it has the features I have been looking for as a WP plugin that I need for a few blogs.
Other cloaking plugins have not lived up to their promises so far, so this is well appreciated.
May have to upgrade!
Awesome plugin, handle thousands of links across all my blogs, like a clockwork!
This is very good plugin. I like very much. Thanks so much.
Thanks for this plugin, used it and works correctly.
I’m going to try the free version first, but after reading some of the earlier comments about rss feeds, could you tell me if your paid plugin works with ebay rss feeds? I use simple pie to populate some of my blogs, but haven’t been able to cloak them. Google hates these links and the serps reflet their hate for them, especially since there are many of them.
I’d love to find a plugin that works with either simple pie, or rss feeds in general.
This was easy. Thanks White Shadow for a great FREE plug-in!
Uploaded it, activated it, saved my permalinks…
DONE.
Assuming the RSS feeds contain normal HTML links (as opposed to JavaScript widgets or IFrames disguised as links), they should work fine with the paid version.
I also use simplepie for my rss feeds from a ticket site and the plug-in (paid version) works great. See an example here:
http://atlantageorgiaconcerts.com/concerts/
Is this a problem from a Google perspective that the hop link stillshows in the url bar?
If the links are no-followed, Google most likely won’t care.
Really great tool! Thanks
It’s a hell of a plugin, if you are using wordpress for PPC landing pages it’s almost a must have!
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin [...]
Can someone post an example of the .htaccess file for this plugin.
For some reason my .htaccess is not being updated by wordpress even though it has write access with 666 when I save permalinks.
I even had to add the code for the permalinks manually.
Thanks!!
Here’s an example :
The plugin code should be placed above the WP .htaccess code.
Hi,
I’ve installed the plugin but keep getting this http://pickoffers.com/shop/link/145/1 instead of the cloaked post name url. I’ve gone through the posts on here and have modified the .htaccess file, updated the permalinks and have even deactivated all my plugins but still none the closer.
What do I need to send you to try and get the cloaked links working on my site?
Cheers.
The URL you mention is a cloaked URL, so I’m not sure I understand your problem.
Hi White Shadow,
I have installed your Link cloaking plugin for WordPress. I’m VERY pleased to say that the banner link in a post to a website that I am trying to affiliate to has now been cloaked -automatically too! I have been struggling for hours trying various cloaking plugins with no success whatsoever until I found yours via a Google search.
I still have a problem however, I hope you can advise me in layman’s one-step-at-a-time terms how I cloak a banner link in the SIDEBAR of this post that is pointing to the same affiliation. I can not understand why this sidebar banner link is not cloaked whereas the banner link in the body of the post is cloaked.
Please help!
Sutton Cheney
The free version of the plugin doesn’t automatically cloak sidebar links. You’d need to get the paid version to do that.
That said, you can use the free version to cloak the sidebar links manually :
1. Go to the Tools -> Cloaked Link tab. You’ll see a form for adding “static” links.
2. Take the normal, uncloaked URL of the sidebar link and copy it to the “Destination URL” field.
3. Enter a name of your choosing for the cloaked link. This name will show up in the cloaked URL.
4. Click “Add”.
5. Find the newly added cloaked link in the link table on the same page and click the “show cloaked url” thingy to display the cloaked URL that the plugin generated for that link.
6. Edit the sidebar link and replace its original URL with the cloaked one.
Repeat the process to manually add more cloaked links.
From what I understand I can choose to have the postname within the cloaked url. Instead of the link previous (http://pickoffers.com/shop/link/145/1 ) it would be http://pickoffers.com/shop/verseo-cordless-air-pressure-leg-massager/145/1 . I done everything which I have read on this comments but still can’t the link to show the post name instead of the word “link”.
Sorry just as a quick side note, the link with the post name does work but it’s getting it to automatically show the post name in the cloaked link opposed to me manually having to go in change it is where is I’m having issues.
Sorry, but I think you’ve misunderstood something. You can’t include the post name in the cloaked link. The plugin can use the anchor text of the link in the URL, but not the post name.
Ah ok, my apologies. I did misunderstand, I was under the impression it would replace the word “link” for the /%postname%/.
Thanks
By the way, great plugin and have sent a donation your way.
Thanks for the donation
I’m having the same problem with the links being redirected to a 404 error page. For ex. if your go to my post http://www.therealtimscott.com/build-wealth-quickly-upmost-integrity/ and click on the link under the vid, it redirects to this page: http://www.therealtimscott.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=562&link_num=1&cloaked_url=goto/Top_Tier_Marketing_PRO/562/1
The htaccess is a 777, and the linkcloak code is at the top of the file, so I’m at a loss
Are you using a plugin, or some .htaccess trick, to prevent visitors from accessing .php files in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory?
From the error messages, it looks as if both wplc_redirector.php and wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php are missing from the “link-cloaking-plugin” folder, but if that was true then the plugin wouldn’t work at all.
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin [...]
Hi White Shadow,
First off, thanks for a fantastic plugin… Ran into a little issue that was addressed a while back.
I am using custom fields to insert links into the template and the plugin does not seem able to cloak it. There was a fix you recommended, but it seems the code has changed since then. I was wondering if you had an up to date fix or if the premium version caters to this.
The premium version should be able to cloak links from custom fields, yes.
I can’t seem to recall the fix you mentioned, can you point me to the specific comment?
It is comment number 50 in your comment list.
I see. It should be pretty easy to tweak the code in that comment to work with the latest version of the plugin.
To wit, everything said in the “rewriting the link” section of that comment still applies. The redirector code itself (wplc_redirector.php) has changed, but very little. You just need to replace lines 19-25 in that file with something like this :
Hi White Shadow,
Thanks for taking the time out to help. It now masks the url, but the URL is broken… it just leads to a white page, no redirection.
Any Ideas?
Hmm, what’s your site URL? Maybe I should take a look.
I’m using a blank html page to hide my plugins, and both of those php files were in the plugin folder. I delted the pluging and re-installed it, and I’m still getting the same issues
{Are you using a plugin, or some .htaccess trick, to prevent visitors from accessing .php files in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory?
From the error messages, it looks as if both wplc_redirector.php and wplc_link_cloaking_plugin.php are missing from the “link-cloaking-plugin” folder, but if that was true then the plugin wouldn’t work at all.}
Is there a way to diagnose this issue over email instead of by this comment section?
You can email me at whiteshadow {at} w-shadow {dot} com.
I emailed you and have not received an email back yet
Weird, my response must’ve been caught by your spam filter or otherwise gotten lost. I’ll post it here then :
Hey Tim,
Here’s what I’ve found. The .php files are indeed where they should be, and are visible when accessing the directory URL like this :
http://edited/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/
However, if you try to click on one of the .php files, e.g.
http://edited/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php
…you’ll get a 404. This doesn’t happen for other files in that directory – for example, clicking on “tick.png” will display the green “tick” icon (as expected). This is a very strong indication that something in your server configuration or your .htaccess file(s) is preventing visitors from accessing .php files within the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Perhaps you should ask your hosting provider about this?
Cheers,
Janis Elsts / White Shadow
Heres what my htaccess looks like
# BEGIN WordPress
# Link Cloaker Plugin BEGIN
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^goto/([^/]*)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ http://www.therealtimscott.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=$2&link_num=$3&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
RewriteRule ^goto/([^/]+)[/]?$ http://www.therealtimscott.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?name=$1&cloaked_url=$0 [L]
# Link Cloaker Plugin ENDS
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Also i’m hosting another site on the same account and the link cloaking plugin is working just fine
That .htaccess looks fine. However, check /wp-content/ and /wp-content/plugins/ for extra .htaccess files.
Other than that, I’m fresh out of ideas. Get the premium version, perhaps?
It doesn’t use .htaccess redirects and doesn’t need the plugin folder to be web-accessible.
Hi thanks for such a great plugin!
However, I have a question about the type of link created…
Does the plugin produce 301 or 302 redirects?
It does a 301 redirect.
Oops! Thought as much.
I was using the plugin to cloak ebay links. However they recently announced they are not allowing 301 redirects and must change to 302.
Can I do this within the plugin or would this total defeat the purpose of the plugin?
Thanks.
Assuming you’re not averse to manual editing, you can change the redirect type pretty easily. Just open up wplc_redirector.php in any text editor and change line 42 from this :
to this :
Got it, that’s perfect, thanks!
Hi
Do you know why im getting this error message when i try to use the link cloaking plugin : http://www.pandadragon.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php?post_id=4579&link_num=2&cloaked_url=View/link/4579/2
I have had to disable the plugin for now as it makes my site inaccessiable.
It appears that something on your site is blocking direct access to .php files in the /wp-content/ directory. For example, this works :
http://www.pandadragon.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/readme.txt
… but this doesn’t :
http://www.pandadragon.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_redirector.php
Unless this block is disabled, the free version of the cloaker will not work on your blog. You could try the premium version though – it has a more sophisticated cloaking mechanism that won’t be affected by this problem.
Hi Thanks for your reply.
Do you have any ideas what could be blocking it? i checked my robots.txt and nothing there?
Thanks
Phil
It’s more likely to be something in the .htaccess or the server config. itself.
HIya
i used to have it working so i know its most prob not a server issue, also it works on four of my new domains :-S, i looked at htaccess one part did have a old sub directory in it so changed it but still nothing, perhaps if anyone else reading this has any ideas, i would be extremely grateful.
Thanks
Phil: you could try disabling your plugins one by one just to see if there is some conflict – maybe a recent plugin update might have triggered the issue
Hi Dermot
I could do but my plugins mirror on all sites and i have link cloaking plugin successfully running on 4 of my 10 sites so i 95% sure its not a plugin conflict.
Thanks for the suggestion though
I got a malfunction today, although this has never happened before:
I usually use to cloak the link, it works fine for me. Until my latest blog post (it today), doesn’t work. The cloaked link just go to my blog home page.
Anyone can help me?! Thanks b4.
@ Phil : I still think it’s something in the server conf. that’s causing the problem.
@ tantan : I’ve looked at the post you mention and I can’t find anything that would cause the plugin to not cloak the link. I’m guessing WP filters out or normalizes whatever is wrong with the link (if there is something wrong with it), so could you check it in the post editor and send me the HTML code corresponding to that link?
TanTan i’m having the same problem, it was working fine this morning and I haven’t changed anything. Now none of my cloaked links work, they just redirect to my ownsite/error page.
I recently did the auto upgrade for your fantastic plug-in but now for some reason I’m unable to generate a new cloaked link for my static cloaked links? also all of the older cloaked static links have vanished?
@ Steve & others : Consider the premium version, perhaps?
@ roc : Could you elaborate? Are you getting an error message, or is it something else?
Thanks, but i switched to another plugin and its working fine
It simply does nothing now? I type in the name & url and click add and nothing happens? And the previous cloaked static links are gone the tables empty?
So I deactivated the plugin and removed it and re-installed the previous version I have saved locally, and I can’t get it to work again? it does as the new version? weird, huh?
I have been deactivated a previous plug which I upgraded so see if there may have been a conflict but I couldn’t get your plug in to work? It was working as you can see by the proof on the banner ads on the sidebar.
Thanks for the lighting fast reply, btw
The fact that the “Add” button does nothing indicates that there is some kind of a JavaScript problem. Check your browser’s error console for details/error messages. To open the console, go to Tools -> Error Console in Firefox. In IE you need to double-click the error icon in the bottom-left corner of the window instead. Other browsers probably have something similar.
Okay I opened firebug this time and re-entered my data to and it shows the following error in firebug; saveCloakedLink is not defined
http://medicallyfragilechild.com/wp-admin/tools.php?page=link-cloaking-plugin-links
Line 1
I also tried this in chrome:
$(‘myForm’).addEvent(‘submit’, function(e) {
Uncaught TypeError: Property ‘$’ of object [object DOMWindow] is not a function
Judging by the error message from Chrome, the problem is being caused by a different plugin. The link cloaker doesn’t have a line like that anywhere in it’s code, or even a form identified as “myform”.
Try selectively deactivating your other plugins until you find the culprit.
okay I went and found the plugin and disabled it. but I’m still unable to get the static cloak link to work. The error generated in both F.F & Chrome are now reading:
Uncaught ReferenceError: saveCloakedLink is not defined (line 144 of tools.php)
Hmm, try this version.
I still had the same problem after uploading the new version you sent, but I managed to find and fix the error. Turns out, the database table needed to be dropped I went and dropped the table “_cloaked_links” that the plugin creates (after a back up of data of course) and started a fresh install with v1.6 (file you sent me), it created a new table and it works now. for some odd reason it was not allowing the data to be written to the table in the database from the previous version but. it’s all good, thanks I appreciate all your help, you have an awesome lil plugin.
An issue that I’ve seen discussed on my forum recently is whether IE8 blocks the cookie from a cloaked affiliate link by it’s privacy settings. I’m no expert but it seems that this is happening with some cloakers and so we are losing sales.
Does your plugin interfere with cookie setting in IE8?
Also I have no follow selected, but when I look at my links there is no no follow in the code.
Any idea why that may be?
Thanks
The plugin doesn’t touch cookies, so I don’t think it should have any effect on that. However, I haven’t really tested that extensively. If you discover a case where the cookies are blocked when the link is cloaked by this plugin, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
As for links missing nofollow, could you show me an example?
Hiya i dont think its server related, because 6 of my ten sites it works on and all on same server. its just 4 that dont :-S
Well, I’m out of ideas then.
Hello,
Is it possible to remove Link_Text_Here in http://domain.com/prefix/Link_Text_Here/12/34
Thanks
No. However, you can create “static” cloaked links that have whatever text you choose in place of “Link_Text_Here”. See Tools -> Cloaked Links.
[...] want to use Amazon without plugin shops then you can go for a WP plugin that will cloak your links Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress | W-Shadow.com Graham Reply With Quote + Reply to Thread « Previous [...]
Thanx again
hello, I installed version 1.6 of the plugin on wp 3.0 but when I post a url example http://www.namesito.com/id56773 is not added. If I insert the url without http:// http://www.namesito.com/id56773 type is added but the hyperlink does not work. I tried with both IE and firefox but the problem is always present. What is the problem?
thanks
Hello,
I seem to be having the same problem as Stefano above when I try to create a static cloaked link. Without http, it will generate a “cloaked link”….though it is not functional. When I enter the entire url, including http://, and click “add”….it will not generate a cloaked link.
All of my other static links created previously remain in place. Some were created as recently as last week. Any advice you could give to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Gah, looks like I need to set up a separate testing site just for PHP4. Or maybe drop PHP4 support.Disregard that, I commented on the wrong post.
All right, perhaps the 1.7 update I just released will help with the “http://” problem. At the very least, it should provide a better indication of what goes wrong when trying to add an URL that contains the protocol prefix.
I’ve been using the plug-in for many months and it has always worked perfectly. I tried to cloak a link today and it no longer works. When I click the tab to ADD, it says Adding link… and just freezes right there and never adds the cloaked link.
I have updated to the new version 1.7 and it still does not work.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
I updated the plugin to version 1.7 but still does not work. If I enter the url without http:// it works, but if you insert the link are not added
And no error messages? That’s strange. Version 1.7 should display an error if something goes wrong server-side.
Check the JS console, maybe it’s a bug in there’s a bug in my JavaScript.
I use the Internet when I click on Add Exporer and nothing happens. Where should the error?
Firefox comes with filebug when I add something:
GET http://www.stefanopepi.com/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/wplc_ajax.php?action=add_link&name=dd&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stefanopepi.com%2
http://www.stefanopepi.com/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=jquery,utils,thickbox&ver=681791909e5bd7a324a42bd282c3a27d
LINE 130
That’s probably not the whole message though, that’s just the URL of the script.
Hmm, this would go a lot faster if I could see the problem first-hand…
Just want to add that I also tried cloaking a link by leaving off the http:// and it will cloak the link. However, when you click on the newly cloaked link, it will take you to an error page not found.
I used Google.com for this test and this is where it took me:
http://successaffiliatemarketing.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/link-cloaking-plugin/google.com
I wonder how much difference there is between the free and paid versions but I have the paid version on 30+ sites and it works perfectly.
@ Robert : Well, unless someone can give me access to their admin panel so that I can analyse the situation directly, there’s not much more that I can suggest.
@ Greg : They are very different. The paid version was basically written from scratch; it shares almost no code with the free version.
Hello you can use one of my not working, give me your email address where I can send you your login information?
Send it to whiteshadow at w-shadow dot com.
I’ve sent you a message at your contact address regarding this matter.
I’m still not sure what’s causing the problem, but after running a couple of tests on Stefano’s site I’ve managed to produce a bugfix that appears to prevent it. Download the fix here.
Ok now it works. I uploaded the file to your site accedereal try my site and see if there is some other problem.
thanks
Hi White Shadow,
I uploaded the fix and that took care of the problem.
Thanks very much for responding to the problem so quickly and efficiently.
Does the plugin work with the latest version of WordPress – 3.0? Thanks.
yes . now it works. You must install the version 1.8
I’m using Link Cloaking now but it has not work on my blog (www.ghufron.com). this is the cloaked link: http://www.ghufron.com/produk/affiliate/.
I’ve tried deactivating all plugins installed on my blog, but the problem still continue.
Please tell me by email when you have correct the problem
Thank you!
Ghufron
Make sure your .htaccess contains the plugin’s code. If not, try updating your permalinks.
Thank you for replying my comment…
Ok, how do I update my .htaccess?
Below are the lists of my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.ghufron.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ghufron.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Thank you so much for your supports
Hi! I really glad tonight because as you say, I found the .htaccess update on Permalink menu.
So, I say thanks very much…cihuyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!
Hey White Shadow,
I like your plug in. Does the link always have to show the numbers at the end. Is there anything we can change in the .htaccess file.
I know you said in the recent post about creating static links to say whatever but I tried that and when you hover the mouse over the link it still shows http://domain.com/prefix/Link_Text_Here/12/34
Can show me what I’m doing wrong? Maybe I need to update the permalinks after I change the setting.
Thanks
Mike
@ Mike :
When you create a static link, it gives you a unique cloaked URL for that link. Click “show cloaked url” in the links table to display it. Then you need to manually replace your original, uncloaked links with that URL – it’s not done automatically in the free version.
Hey White Shadow,
Thanks, I finally figured that out. I also had another small problem I figured out. I use a add on domain and it would chunk out when viewing http://domain.com/subdomain/prefix/Linktext/12/4.
I have my ad on domain in general settings to go straight to my addon as a real domain. So every time I use selective cloaking, it would spit out the whole link when viewing it such as http://www.domain.com/addon.com/prefix/12/4.
I have to remove the first part every time and it works.
Thanks
Mike
I tried all of the “fixes” in WP 3.0… did the htaccess code, saved permalinks, etc etc… still not working in WP 3.0 and yes, I have version 1.8 installed.
Now what???
not working, im getting 404 error. I even updated permalinks, .htaccess & plugin settings, but still getting 404.
im using wordpress 3.0..
whats wrong?
Love the plug-in and it works great on the first site I tried it on, but on this second site it is not working the same. It is indeed cloaking all the links, but the links in the last paragraph I have listed in the Exception box, yet they are still being cloaked. I tried deactivating and reactivating, deleting and re-installing, and updating the Permalink structure, but I still get the same result. What else should I try?
Make sure you only enter the domain name in that box, not the entire URL. For example, “something.com” will work, but “htt://something.com/” and “http://something.com/page.html” will not.
I did that also. It is strange because when I used the plug-in on another site, about 6 days ago, it worked perfectly, even with the http:// prefix, but when I checked the site last night after having problems with my new site, I noticed that all the links were cloaked. I went in just now and removed the http:// from all the domains and the links are still showing up a cloaked.
I finally gave up last night and did selective cloaking, which is not quite as easy since there are more links that I want to cloak than not cloak, but it works. Not really sure what else to try at this point.
If I have an image that contains a link, is there a way to cloak that image link?
Hmm, it should’ve worked. Could you send me a few examples of the mistakenly cloaked links + a screenshot of your settings page? ( whiteshadow at w-shadow dot com )
Most image links can indeed be cloaked. You need to insert the selective cloaking code right after the image tag, but before the closing </a> tag.
Okay, email just sent. Thanks!
HI ,
I just downloaded the free version today, installed it and activated it on my website.
None of my links were cloaked so I am sure I left out a step or did something wrong.
I don’t quite understand the instructions regarding the permalinks. I already had permalinks set to a custom setting, /%postname%/ .
So, I am not sure what to do now at this point in order to get this to work.
Here are your instructions from above:
Re-save your permalink settings to insert the plugin’s link redirection code to the WordPress .htaccess file :
* WP 2.7 and above : Go to Settings -> Permalinks and click “Save Changes”.
I did everything after the *, but no links were cloaked.
Can you help me with this please?
That’s strange. Perhaps selective cloaking has somehow become enabled? Go to Settings -> Link Cloaking and make sure the “Cloak all links” option is ticked.
Also, could you show me some examples of the links that should be cloaked but aren’t?
Hi White Shadow,
Thanks! “Cloak all links” is checked.
I noticed that links within posts ARE cloaked. But links in my “links” area are not cloaked nor are the links in widgets that are in my side bar. The widgets contain are affiliate banner links with pictures imbedded. Is your plugin set to cloak those types of links?
Here is an example of a link that did not cloak in my links side bar area:
http://www.frrco.com/123268
But this same link IS cloaked when it appears in a post.
Any ideas here?
I appreciate you taking the time here to help me with this.
The free version of the plugin only cloaks links in post/page content. If you want to cloak sidebar widgets and such, you need to get the premium version
Thanks! I do like how it works on the posts. I might just have to buy the premium version then!
Hi,
Thanks for this plugin, its really great. I’m having a problem though that I haven’t seen having read through all the comments. The link cloaking plugin works fine for the posts on my site, however, when I create any static Cloaked Links, I get a 404? Seems odd as it should work for static links if the normal cloaked links work ok, any ideas? I have my permalinks changed, and the re-write section is at the top of my .htaccess file, and still 404′s on the static links, any ideas? I have a number of WP installs, and all act in the same manner, seems odd, can you help?
Here’s an example URL that isn’t working:
http://www.ancient-words-of-wisdom.com/wordpress/recommends/Test-Link/
But if you look on the homepage, there are working cloaked links there…
Thanks,
Mike.
This is a bug. I’ll have the fix out in a few hours.
Great, wonderful support, thanks for this, I look forward to the fix!
Thanks,
Mike.
Thanks all this info and download.zip
Regard
Keep blogging
I don’t have a problem with paid plugins vs free but you got to realize the free ones work very well. I do have a problem with over priced software and I don’t think many people will pay your price. Should have been less then half of that amount. Why is it worth so much in your mind? Pretty graphs of clicks? Google Analytics? naw, sorry no big deal.
I think the single thing that would tempt me is something you are not offering – it is something I have had a lot of trouble with.
Updates and compatibility.
If you where to give out an iron clad guarantee that you would accept the responsibility to stay on top of every wordpress update and make certain your plug-in was updated for the new version of wordpress out it would go a long way in my mind to assure me I was doing business with some one who realizes they have some responsibility after they take my money.
Without an iron clad guarantee I am buying a shiny new plug-in that will degenerate until it is worthless to me when you tire of supporting it in a few years. Then go off in another direction to pursue other things. You imply support and free updates but you do not state it boldly.
I own a small ISP and web hosting business and I know about customer support. I am the smallest ISP/web hosting company in our area and I have the best customer support of any local company I know of. I allow my customers to contact me ANY TIME they need my help.
I make a commitment to my customers. If I supply your broadband or host/build your website I will be there for you no excuses. The other companies simply wimp out on support. After 5:30 you get an answering machine with them. I answer the phone and help people no matter when or where I am and no matter what I am doing.
COMMITMENT to SERVICE and SUPPORT. No substitute….
###
Hiho and thanks for this nifty tool!
Is it possible that it has a little problem with WP3.0 MultiSite installations?
Install, settings, updating permalinks: all pretends to work fine without any error messages, but cloaked URLs all end up as 404s…
Bug or feature?
Cheers
Martin
MultiSite mode isn’t officially supported by the plugin, so… more like “feature suggestion”
It’s on my to-do list.
Hi there!
Thanks for an amazing plugin. However, I’ve run into a problem that I can’t seem to solve.
I’m trying to use the plugin to cloak Ebay links. These links are supposed to direct users to relevant parts of eBay.
Now when I enter the URL contained in the link into the browser directly, it goes properly to the search results I’ve defined in the link. But when I activate the plugin, all my links now go incorrectly to the eBay home page.
I’ve tried everything to get these to work properly, but to no avail. Do you know how I can get it to work?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Could you show me a few example links?
Oops never mind…
I think I found the problem. There was probably something wrong with my HTML editor and when I pasted the link in, it must have messed up the code somehow. I just went to the WP admin interface, clicked the HTML editor there, and inserted the link. Everything seems to be working fine now.
Thanks for the reply!
[...] Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress [...]
if I am doing the selective cloaking where do I put the tag. I tried putting it in the link when I hit the hyperlink chain option in wordpress where you do your post.
That didn’t work. Where do I put it?
I really would like to have “cloak all links” but when I put things in the exception field they are still cloaked. I tried deactivating and reactivating and it didn’t help.
I went to permalinks under settings and there is no button to “update permalinks” it only says “save changes”. Your other post said to go to “options” and then update permalinks. I don’t see any “options” tab. I only see permalinks under settings.
Thanks
Put the tag inside, or after, the link text. This should be done in HTML view. Example:
Keep in mind that the exception list is for domain names, not links in general. That is, “example.com” will work, but “http://example.com/” won’t do anything at all.
The installation instructions are a bit outdated. The “Settings” menu was called “Options” in older versions of WordPress, and the button on the permalink configuration page was called “Update Permalinks” once. I’ll update the readme to reflect the new Dashboard organization.
Lots of links cloaked using this plugin just reload the page rather than take the user to the desired website.
Any ideas why?
See this page: http://carbatterycharger.org.uk/halfords-fully-automatic-car-battery-charger/
I see two cloaked links on that page. When I click any of them, I get redirected to a product listing on http://www.halfords.com. As far as I can tell, this is the expected result.
Tested in IE 8, Opera 10.61 and Chrome 6.0.
Thanks for looking.
If I log out of WordPress then click on the links it works but if I am logged in then it takes me to the domain level.
Cheers!
I guess you might have some sort of plugin conflict then.
thank’s Shadow….
Hi,
Loving the plugin so far thanks! However, clicks don’t seem to be registered by WP Stats since I installed this. Is this expected behaviour as they are now clicks on my domain rather than external links? Is there any way to fix this?
Thanks,
Dave
Yes, that is to be expected.