If someone wants to make a copy of a publicly accessible web page, they can do that easily enough. Cloaked links would neither help nor hinder them.

As for “capturing your affiliate income”, I’m going to assume you’re talking about someone copying your affiliate link and replacing your affiliate ID with their own. This kind of thing is possible, but cloaked links make it harder. In fact, preventing commission theft is pretty much the raison d’etre of link cloaking.

And even if someone does copy & modify your aff. link, this will only allow them to buy the product (or whatever) without giving you a commission. It will not affect your site. Cloaked links don’t give people magical powers to go and edit your websites.

Does cloaking or redirects allow for others to capture your affiliate income or copy your pages etc to their site, or sites you may not want any affiliation with?

From all I read from the 2008 time, this has beoome a very serious issue.

Thanks

Thanks again for your insights.

Now, you could also configure the plugin to display the target site in a frame (thus obscuring the address bar URL, too)… that would make your hat a rather dark shade of grey.

Whether white-hats would/should use link cloaking is an interesting question. On the one hand, making a link appear to lead somewhere else than where it actually does seems decidedly non-white. On the other, tens of thousands of people do this every day with services like TinyUrl and Bit.ly and their sites seem no worse for wear in terms of SEO. So it’s a risk/reward decision.

Then again, one could argue that a true white-hat would never even consider a strategy that implies any kind of risk…

I am doing some research on link cloaking as I teach beginner internet marketing classes and I want to have some idea of what I am talking about.

After trying the simple link cloaker on one of my affiliate sites, and having the site disappear from the server with a 500 error post haste, I decided, whoops something may not be kosher.

A “guru” (whatever!) suggested to his students (me) that this tool would keep Google from recognizing that your unique affiliate site was in fact an affiliate site and this would help bring traffic.

Now after reading at Google and noticing that the Yaro S and Darren R don’t really get into the subject much at all, I thought I would see what you , as a developer of a link cloaker would say. Is this tool a black hat tool, is there room for grey? If I were teaching white hat only, would I not only have the links be original, but maybe in RED so Google can for sure see them? (just kidding, I know color doesn’t do it…)

Okay, Sorry for such a long post. I am really trying to learn here and value your comments either publically or personally.