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.
- 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 Options -> 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 :
- WP 2.7 and above : Go to Settings -> Permalinks and click “Save Changes”.
- Older versions of WP : Go to Options -> Permalinks and click “Update Permalinks”.
Download
Version 1.3 : link-cloaking-plugin.zip (9 KB)
Requirements :
- WordPress 2.2 – 2.8.4
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.
Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress…
This new plugin may be useful to anyone posting affiliate links on a blog. It can cloak either all or only selected links….
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
[...] Cloak Affiliate Links – This plugin is necessary if you care about how your links look to visitors. Instead of displaying awful-looking affiliate links, like “http://wrdz72.notascam.buynow.com=?aff=12345“, this plugin will make your affiliate links look much more natural, readable, and non-threatening. It’s not perfect – the plugin does leave a couple numbers at the end (no big deal) – but it’s much nicer than the soup of letters and numbers most affiliate links resemble. [...]
[...] time ago I created a WordPress plugin that can cloak affiliate links automatically. Today I’m releasing a new version, with all-new [...]
[...] Visit [...]