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.
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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.
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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
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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