Have you ever hesitated before clicking a link, unsure of where it might lead?
Link cloaking starts here. This technique conceals a link’s true destination, displaying a neater, friendlier URL in the browser instead. But it’s not just about appearances; a cloaked link also plays a crucial role in enhancing security, ensuring accuracy, and enhancing user confidence.
This guide provides everything you need to know about link cloaking, including its benefits, easy methods, and best practices. From shortening links to staying transparent and tracking clicks, we’ll walk you through it all.
What is link cloaking?
Link cloaking, link disguising, or link masking is a technique used to hide the actual destination URL of a link while presenting a different, more user-friendly link to visitors.
This is often done for various reasons, including affiliate marketing, branding, tracking, and improving the appearance of links. By cloaking a link, you can make it appear cleaner and more trustworthy, as well as monitor click-through rates and other metrics.
Note: Link cloaking can sometimes be misused for deceptive or malicious purposes; therefore, it’s essential to use it responsibly and transparently.
Affiliate link cloaking: What does it mean?
Affiliate link cloaking refers to the practice of concealing or disguising affiliate links to make them appear more user-friendly and appealing.
Affiliate marketing involves promoting products or services through unique affiliate links, and when a user clicks on such a link and makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission.
However, these affiliate links can often be long, complex, and not very attractive. To address this, affiliate marketers use a link cloaking tool to create links that are shorter, cleaner, and more customized.
Purpose of cloaking affiliate links
There are several benefits of cloaking affiliate links. To name a few:
Makes affiliate links blend seamlessly into the content
Provides a branded and professional appearance
Increases the likelihood of user clicks
Enables tracking of click-through rates
Allows access to analytics for measuring campaign effectiveness
Link cloaking vs. link shortening: What’s the difference?
Here’s a quick comparison to help you understand the difference between link cloaking and link shortening:
Hide affiliate URLs and IDs: Link cloaking masks long, messy affiliate links and referral IDs, making your links look clean and click-worthy. This is especially helpful for Amazon affiliate links.
Use branded, clickable URLs: Replace generic links with short, branded URLs using your own domain. It builds trust and can significantly boost your click-through rate.
Maximize marketing ROI
by transforming ordinary URLs into branded short links that convert.
Try Replug for free
Keep links flexible: Need to change where a link goes after it’s been shared? No problem. Cloaking lets you change the destination URL without touching the short link.
Improve email link deliverability: Affiliate links in emails can trigger spam filters. Cloaking helps your links look clean and safe, improving inbox placement and engagement.
Add retargeting and CTA features: With tools like Replug, you can add retargeting pixels, CTA buttons, and other enhancements; perfect for capturing and converting more users.
Track link performance: Cloaked links double as tracking links, giving you detailed analytics on every click; from location and device to time and campaign performance.
To use Replug for link masking, follow these steps:
Step 1: Sign in to Replug or create an account for a free 14-day trial.
Step 2: Paste the original URL you want to shorten in the bar under “Quickly Shorten your link”
Step 3: You’ll be led to a pop-up where you can connect your custom domain and edit the URL slug of the original link. Here you can also add UTM parameters behind your link (optional).
Step 4: Enable link cloaking. This ensures that your custom, branded URL remains visible in the browser’s address bar
Step 6: Once done, click the “Save Shortened Link” button. Your cloaked URL is now ready to share across all platforms.
Monitor cloaked link analytics with Replug
Replug offers valuable insights such as click-through rates and geotargeting data related to the users interacting with your cloaked links.
By utilizing this data, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of how your links are performing. This information helps you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, identify trends, and make informed decisions for optimizing your strategies.
Whether you want to track engagement, reach the right audience, or optimize your campaigns, Replug’s analytics give you the insights to fine-tune your strategy and hit your goals.
A complete link management solution
for marketing professionals & agencies.
Try Replug for free
Conclusion
Link cloaking helps you clean up messy URLs, protect affiliate commissions, and build trust with branded links. When used transparently, it’s a powerful way to improve link performance, track engagement, and manage where your traffic goes.
Whether you’re in affiliate marketing or simply want more control over your links, cloaking is a tactic worth using.
FAQs about link cloaking
How does link cloaking work?
Cloaked link often uses technologies like iFrames to display the destination URL within a webpage, while showing a different link to users.
Is link cloaking ethical?
Link cloaking itself is neutral, but its ethical use is crucial. Transparently informing users about cloaked links, especially in affiliate marketing, is essential.
Are cloaked links trackable?
Yes, many cloaking methods allow you to track click-through rates and other analytics to measure the performance of your links.
Can I retarget users with cloaked links?
Yes, some cloaking tools let you add retargeting or remarketing tags to cloaked pages, enabling you to show ads to users who clicked but didn’t convert.
Get ready for an exciting showdown as we compare two of the top link management tools: Replug vs. Pretty Links!
At first glance, you might assume these are two entirely different types of software.
Replug excels across various platforms—supporting websites, blogs, social media, email marketing, advertising networks, and more. On the other hand, Pretty Links is primarily tailored for WordPress users.
However, both tools share a wealth of features, including link cloaking, split testing for URLs, custom slugs, and affiliate link analytics.
Each tool offers unique strengths to cater to diverse user needs and preferences. So, get ready to discover why Replug is the best Pretty Links alternative.
In this article, we’ll dissect the strengths and weaknesses of both tools, ultimately determining which one deserves the title of best link management solution!
What is Replug? Replug is an all-star link management tool packed with top features such as branded link shortening, bio links, link analytics, traffic routing, QR codes, retargeting pixels, deep linking, and much more.
A complete link management solution
for marketing professionals & agencies.
Try Replug for free
What is Pretty Links? Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin, mainly designed for affiliate marketers allowing them to create clean, branded URLs.
Don’t have time for a detailed comparsion? Don’t worry here’s a quick run-down just for you!
Feature
Replug
Pretty Links
User interface & ease of use
Modern, intuitive, clean dashboard, drag-and-drop features
Integrates with various platforms (email, social, CRM)
Limited to WordPress ecosystem and plugins
Pricing
Basic: $19/mo Professional: $49/mo Agency: $79/mo (20% off on annual plans)
Beginner: $99.50/year; Marketer: $149.60/year; Super Affiliate: $199.60/year
Free plan
No
No
Pros
Limited to WordPress Can be costly for small or mid-tier businesses
Adapts to various needs offers diverse integrations, provides value for money
Cons
No free plan (yet!)
SEO-friendly, Mainly for WordPress users
Reviews
Handy Link Management Tool with URL shortener and more.
Limited to WordPress, Can be costly for small or mid-tier businesses.
Quick verdict: Replug offers extensive features for marketers and businesses, ideal for those seeking detailed link tracking, advanced routing, and customizable CTAs.
Detailed feature comparison: Replug vs. Pretty Links
Regarding managing and optimizing URLs for marketing, both Replug and Pretty Links are popular tools offering various features. We’ll do a one-on-one comparison so you can choose the one that suits your needs.
1. User interface & ease of use
Replug:
Design: Replug offers a modern and intuitive interface. The dashboard (Called Home) is clean, with easy navigation and a clear overview of all your campaigns.
User experience: The platform’s straightforward design and helpful tutorials make it quickly learnable for new users. The quick actions functionality enhances ease of use, particularly when creating campaigns.
Pretty Links:
Design: Pretty Links has a functional but slightly less modern interface. It integrates into the WordPress dashboard, which may be familiar to WordPress users but can be overwhelming for beginners.
User experience: While it provides extensive functionalities, the learning curve may be steeper for those who need to get used to WordPress plugins. Users often appreciate the vast options available but may find navigation less intuitive.
Winner Replug stands out as the winner due to its modern, intuitive interface and ease of use, making it accessible for beginners and efficient for managing campaigns.
Boost ROI with branded URLs!
Enhance your marketing campaigns by creating shareable, trackable, and fully multi-purpose
customizable branded URLs.
Shortening: Replug allows users to create short, branded links effortlessly. Users can customize the link endings, making them memorable and relevant.
Features: Offers bulk URL shortening, link previews, CSV reports, password protection, link expiry, customize favicon, and the ability to set up auto-shortening for shared links.
Pretty Links:
Shortening: Pretty Links excels in URL shortening directly from the WordPress dashboard. It allows users to create clean, custom links easily.
Features: Offers detailed options for link customization, including tracking for each shortened link, which is ideal for WordPress users.
Winner While Pretty Links performs well within the WordPress ecosystem, Replug’s advanced customization options and functionalities make it a more comprehensive solution for URL shortening.
3. Affiliate cloaking
Replug:
Cloaking features: The platform supports link masking, which enhances aesthetics and improves click-through rates by making links appear more legitimate.
Pretty Links:
Cloaking features: Pretty Links is particularly strong in affiliate link cloaking, allowing users to create clean, branded links that hide the original affiliate URLs. This helps in preventing link hijacking and makes links more user-friendly and trustworthy.
Boost ROI with branded URLs!
Enhance your marketing campaigns by creating shareable, trackable, and fully multi-purpose
customizable branded URLs.
Winner Pretty Links, if creating dedicated affiliate links is your primary goal. As Replug offers a broad range of features alongside just affiliate link decloaking.
4. Link tracking
Replug:
Analytics dashboard: Provides comprehensive link analytics, including unique clicks, geographic data, and device information. Users can view real-time stats and historical performance data.
Link performance: This feature allows customers to filter the analytics by campaigns, links, and time to know which links perform best, helping users refine their marketing strategies.
Pretty Links:
Analytics dashboard: Offers just basic tracking features, showing analytics for pixel redirects. However, for advance analytics, one needs to integrate the tools with Google Analytics.
Winner Clearly Replug wins with its built-in, comprehensive analytics and real-time tracking.
5. Traffic routing
Replug:
Routing features: Replug allows users to route traffic based on specific criteria, such as geographic location or device type, enabling targeted marketing strategies.
Custom redirects: Users can set up custom redirects that enhance user experience by directing traffic to the most relevant pages.
Pretty Links:
Routing features: While Pretty Links primarily focuses on tracking and shortening, it also offers basic redirect capabilities but lacks advanced traffic routing features found in Replug.
Custom redirects: Offers options for permanent 301, temporary 302, and 307 redirects. However, the overall traffic routing is less sophisticated than that of Replug.
Winner Replug is the winner with its advanced traffic routing capabilities based on geographic location and device type, offering more precise targeting, whereas Pretty Links provides basic redirect options without the same level of customization.
Customization: Users can customize the foreground background colors and QR codes, which enhances brand visibility. You can also save the code in the format you require.
Track QR scans: QR Scans track how often users scan QR codes linked to specific URLs. Besides that, you can also monitor graphs in Analytics such as: “Clicks vs Unique Clicks vs QR Scans” for shortened links and “Views vs Unique Views vs Clicks” for bio-links.
Pretty Links:
QR code generation: The platform allows you to create QR codes for your links, but unlike Replug, you can neither customize the QR code nor save it in your required format.
Winner Replug takes the crown with its customizable QR codes, advanced tracking, and the option to save in any format.
7. Split testing
Replug:
A/B testing features: Replug offers top-notch A/B testing capabilities, allowing users to test different links or landing pages to optimize conversions.
Performance insights: Users can easily analyze the results of their tests through detailed reports and adjust strategies accordingly.
Pretty Links:
A/B testing features: Pretty Links lets you add up to 20 alternate URLs, and you can assign a “weight” to each one. However, a 50-50 split typically yields the best results.
Winner Pretty Links, if split testing links is your primary goal. Replug offers the split-testing feature as part of its broader functionality.
8. Customized CTAs
Replug:
CTA customization: Replug allows users to create customized calls-to-action (CTAs) that can be embedded within links or as standalone features. This helps in engaging users effectively and guiding them toward desired actions.
Flexibility: Users can create banners, exit-intent pop-ups, bridge pages, and scroll box CTAs to fit different marketing campaigns or target specific audiences, enhancing conversion rates.
Pretty Links:
CTA customization: With Pretty Links, you can enhance your affiliate links by adding Product Displays. This feature lets you showcase products and embed displays anywhere on your site.
Winner It’s challenging to declare a clear winner here, as both tools have their strengths. Replug shines with advanced CTA generation, including banners, pop-ups, and bridge pages, while Pretty Links focuses on product displays linked to URLs. Ultimately, the best choice depends on your specific needs.
9. Integration with other tools
Replug:
Integrations: Replug integrates seamlessly with various platforms, including email marketing tools, social media platforms, CRM systems, and advertising networks, enhancing its usability in diverse marketing strategies.
API Access: Offers API access for advanced users looking to integrate Replug with custom applications.
Pretty Links:
Integrations: Pretty Links primarily integrates within the WordPress ecosystem as a WordPress plugin. It works well with popular plugins and themes but may not offer as many external integrations as Replug.
Limited API: While it has some API capabilities, they are not as extensive as Replug’s.
10. Pricing plans
Replug provides three affordable pricing plans along with a 14-day free trial, making it ideal for affiliate marketers, agencies, and other marketers. In contrast, Pretty Links features tiered pricing that ranges from a basic plan for freelancers to more advanced options designed for agencies, depending on the features required.
Pretty Links
Beginner
Marketer
Super Affiliate
$99.60 / YEAR
$149.60 / YEAR
$199.60 / YEAR
Replug
Basic
Professional
Agency
$15 /mo Save 20 on yearly plans
$39 /mo Save 20 on yearly plans
$63 /mo Save 20 on yearly plans
A complete link management solution
for marketing professionals & agencies.
Try Replug for free
Some other points to look at
Free trial option
Security and scalability
Customization options
Customer support
Cost-effectiveness
Mobile app availability
Reviews and ratings
Our verdict
Both Pretty Links and Replug offer valuable features for managing and optimizing your links, but they cater to different needs.
Pretty Links is a fantastic option for those looking for a straightforward Link disguiser, while Replug – a top pretty links alternative is better suited for marketers and businesses that require more advanced features.
Your choice ultimately depends on your specific needs, budget, and level of expertise.
FAQs on Replug vs. Pretty Links
1. What are the key differences between Replug and Pretty Links?
Replug offers more advanced features like retargeting and CTA overlays, while Pretty Links focuses on simplicity and ease of use within the WordPress ecosystem.
2. Can I use both Replug and Pretty Links together?
Yes, you can use both tools together, especially if you want to leverage the strengths of each for different purposes.
3. Which tool is more cost-effective for small businesses?
Pretty Links is generally more cost-effective for small businesses, especially those
4. Who wins the SEO battle?
Pretty Links can significantly enhance your SEO efforts by enabling you to efficiently manage and monitor your links. Climbing affiliate links and creating branded URLs can also improve your site’s credibility and click-through rates.
Replug’s advanced features, like retargeting and detailed analytics, can help you better understand your audience and optimize your SEO strategies. However, its complexity may be overkill for those just looking for basic SEO improvements.
Affiliate Link Cloaking is a process of replacing the long and clunky affiliate product links with short links that trackable links and point visitors to the same URL destination, but are trustworthy and brandable.
Expert affiliate marketers use affiliate link cloaking to make their affiliate product links look more trustable. You might be wondering how to get your hands on those short links. So let me briefly explain affiliate link cloaking, and then we will touch on more relevant topics you should know about.
Shall we?
Bloggers and marketers use affiliate link cloaking because visitors are hesitant toward longs and clunky product URLs. Most experts try to simplify the URLs, CTAs, and navigation so that readers feel safe.
Perhaps, people are skeptical about long URLs because scammers use several protocols in the URLs or page contents that lead to data theft or privacy issues.
Most website owners want to track the clickability on their site pages to analyze their on-page SEO strategies and understand the content performance through user behavior.
Anyway, affiliate link cloaking allows affiliate marketers and bloggers to minimize the complexity in the website navigation and provide a better user experience.
Should You Cloak Your Affiliate Links?
If you have ever thought about whether or not you should cloak your affiliate links, then this section might convince you to start paying close attention to affiliate link cloaking.
I like cloaking affiliate links because I don’t want to scare off readers – some visitors hover over the links and when they see the long, clunky URLs, they avoid clicking on those links.
Cloaking affiliate links doesn’t mean you want to hide your association with the brands. But instead, it makes readers feel safe when the links seem short and sweet.
Below is a video that will make you understand the importance and benefits of affiliate links.
Can You Make a Living Off of Affiliate Marketing?
The answer is yes; you can make a living off of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a lucrative business model if done right. The only caveat is that you must understand how it works.
Even though most affiliate marketers fail to make a significant amount of money with affiliate marketing, it’s still one of the most popular ways to earn money online.
When content creators put out valuable content to solve the audiences’ problems and mention the links to the products or services they have been using, the audience trusts them with their recommendations.
The best part is that bloggers, YouTubers, and TikTokers make money off of affiliate marketing the same way – they build a fan base, provide value to earn trust, and make money by recommending products.
Since you have some idea of how link cloaking works, it’s important to discuss the fundamental steps of link cloaking.
i. Figure Out the Purpose of URL Shortening
Before you jump on cloaking random links on your blog just because you have seen influencers do this, it’s important to understand why you need to do this. A lot of bloggers blindly follow what experts are doing without having a plan in mind.
Most influencers and pro-bloggers cloak links because they don’t want messy links on their blogs. However, there are other reasons for cloaking links. For instance, short URLs or cloaked links also help in tracking clicks on those links. So figure out why you need to cloak links first.
ii. Identify the Website URLs to Trim Down
It’d be unfair if you start shortening the random URLs on your blog or website. Affiliate marketers and bloggers usually cloak affiliate product links to make them look decent. The reason is that affiliate product links are long and clunky, so cloaking them with a URL shortening tool makes them look nice.
You might not want to shorten the post or page URLs on your blog. Just stick to the affiliate product links when trimming the long URLs.
iii. Choose the Best URL Shortener
Cloaking links isn’t possible without an excellent URL shortener. Even though the core purpose of a link cloaking tool is to make links shorter and cleaner, it’ll be a bonus if any URL shortener provides additional features.
The value-added feature that you may want to look out for in a URL shortener or cloaking tool is click tracking. It’s vital to find out where visitors are clicking on your blog when it comes to affiliate marketing.
iv. Replace the Long URLs with Short Ones
Once you have shortened the long and clunky URLs on your blog using an external URL shortener or a WordPress plugin, the next up is the replacement of the long URLs with shorter ones.
It shouldn’t take so long if you’re using a tool like Lasso. However, you can always replace the links manually.
How to Cloak Links Using URL Shorteners?
If you’re curious about how to cloak affiliate or e-commerce products on your blog or website, then there are several tools to cloak links that might come in handy.
One of the methods to cloak links on a blog or a website is by using a link cloaking WordPress plugin.
However, it’s only possible when you’re using the WordPress open-source program.
I use Replug for URL shortening. It’s a top-notch URL shortener that could connect with custom domains for creating branded short URLs. Plus, it has some of the best features, such as click tracking, integrations, bio link, UTM codes, retargeting, and more.
Let me show you how Replug works.
Go to the Replug website and log in to your account.
Once you’re in the dashboard, you’ll see the option called “Create Quick Replug Link” – this is where you could shorten the URLs.
However, I’d highly recommend checking out a few of our articles on how to use branded URLs or the benefits of using the short branded URLs, etc.
Once you’re logged in to your Replug account, you’ll see the URL shortening section right at the top of the dashboard. All you need is to choose a campaign name and insert the URL you want to shorten.
Once you select the campaign name and paste the long URL to shorten it and proceed with it by clicking on the “create” button, a popup will be prompted with a form to fill out about the short URL.
Fill out the form and you’re all set.
Now you have generated a short URL using Replug URL shortener.
You could later check out the Analytics section to analyze the clickability of the short URLs.
There are several reasons why you should cloak affiliate links, so allow me to share them with you.
Let’s take a look:
i. Clean Link Structure
Let’s admit that when you have short URLs instead of long ones, they look better. One of the aspects of URLs most people ignore is the link structure. If your affiliate link has a bunch of UTM codes, tracking codes, and serial numbers, people won’t trust your links, and rightly so.
So one of the biggest perks of cloaking affiliate links is that you clean up the link structure, which plays a vital role in improving the conversion rate.
ii. Clicks Tracking
You may or may not be properly tracking the affiliate conversion. Most bloggers and affiliate marketers rely on the merchants’ tracking – whatever the seller is using for affiliate sales tracking, and you have to rely on that.
However, when you’re using cloaked affiliate links, you have some control over click tracking. You know how many clicks have been recorded in your URL tracking system and you could match the number with your affiliate statistics. It’d help you figure out how accurate your affiliate dashboard is or enable you to find any discrepancies in the affiliate dashboard tool.
iii. Nofollow Affiliate Links
Most beginner affiliate marketers don’t even know that they should nofollow every affiliate link and most of them let the link juice pass to the merchant sites. When you let the link juice pass to the external sources, you’re letting the search engine bots slip to other sites.
There are WordPress plugins or nofollow scripts (for manual insertion) available for bloggers and affiliate marketers. Plus, you could always use a top-notch link management tool to have more control over your links, even when you’re shortening them.
iv. Increase Clickability
The experts in the SEO industry believe that visitors are likely to click more on short links rather than long links. You may have noticed that professional SEOs and bloggers keep their page URL slugs as short as possible. The same goes for other links, such as affiliate links.
Pro-bloggers and SEO experts think that shorter links get more clickability and add more relevance to the destination URL.
v. Ease of Management
When you’re using a URL shortener to track clicks or conversion, you don’t just have control over data and statistics, but you also have ease of link management. Using a tool like Replug would enable you to track clicks on the short links as well as help you retarget the audiences who have clicked on the links.
So these were some of the main reasons why you should cloak affiliate links and make this process a part of your affiliate marketing regime.
Two Reasons Why Most Affiliate Marketers Fail At Affiliate Marketing
1. Zero Understanding
The no. 1 reason why most affiliate marketers fail is that they don’t figure it out. They think that just because they’ve put out a link to an affiliate product, people will click and buy the product.
It doesn’t work that way – you have to convince people that this product is worth buying. In some cases, the affiliate marketer purchases the product themselves to test out and share the results with the audience. It earns them the trust and loyalty of the audience. Be ready to go above and beyond to earn trust online.
2. Get Quick Rich Scheme
Affiliate marketing isn’t a quick money-making scheme. You’re most likely to fail at affiliate marketing if you don’t have the patience. It ain’t work too fast. Most bloggers who successfully monetize their blogs with affiliate marketing have had loads of failures, and they always learn from their mistakes.
If you want quick money out of it, you’re destined to fail at affiliate marketing. It doesn’t matter if you start with bloggers, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok – it makes no difference unless you understand the game.
Affiliate links drive website visitors to the merchant’s website or landing page. It’s not rocket science that driving traffic to a page or website helps the destination page or website because everyone knows this.
But there is a caveat: if a link is pointing the visitor in a specific direction per se, then the destination page would benefit from it unless the link is nofollowed.
Whenever a link is nofollowed, the search engine bots are directed not to follow the link. This way, the bots don’t travel through that link. Thus, the page or website keeps the bots for a little longer.
However, some SEOs believe that even nofollow links add credibility and trustworthiness in the search engines’ eyes, but not in the same way as the dofollow links.
If you’re wondering whether or not the affiliate links affect SEO, then here are a few cases when affiliate links could potentially affect the SEO performance of a site:
i. Dofollow External Links
Since affiliate links are external or outbound links because they’re directing visitors to a merchant’s website, they could harm your site SEO if they’re dofollow. Most bloggers and affiliate marketers keep their affiliate links nofollow to avoid passing the unnecessary juice to the merchant’s website.
It’s safe to say that dofollow external links could affect your site’s SEO unless they aren’t taken care of from an SEO standpoint.
ii. Broken Affiliate Links
When affiliate links are broken, they’re quite damaging for an affiliate marketing website. There are several reasons why a broken link is dangerous; for instance, it doesn’t generate a sale, and it drives visitors away. This can frustrate readers when they don’t land on the intended merchant page.
So no doubt, a broken affiliate link could result in a bad user experience for your website visitors. And you can’t dominate with SEO techniques if you’re providing a bad user experience to the visitors.
Furthermore, there are WordPress plugins and online tools available that scan your site and report all the broken links.
iii. Clunky Product Links
Have you ever seen a long and clunky product link on e-commerce sites or affiliate blogs? When you hover on the products, you see unending URLs that seem scary at times.
One of the disadvantages of those clunky URLs is that they aren’t optimized for SEO. Plus, it scares visitors off due to their scammy appearance. Such affiliate product links are a no-go.
iv. Bunch of Affiliate Banners
A ton of affiliate product banner ads could frustrate visitors that are trying to learn about the product or find an answer to their query. You don’t have to bombard the visitors with several banner ads. Instead, put a couple of banner ads on the side or in the content if you have to put the banner ads.
Moreover, these image-based banner ads often increase the page loading speed, which fails websites at core web vitals. It’s Google’s mechanism to check and analyze the website page loading speed, accuracy, and quality.
So clearly, loads of banner ads could affect your site’s SEO performance.
However, there is no guarantee that more affiliates would bring in more money or fewer affiliate programs would earn you less money.
It seems impossible to pull off if you’re doing something wrong in affiliate marketing. On the other hand, it may look very simple to those bloggers who figured this out.
I’ve written a blog post about joining multiple affiliate programs and the gist of the blog post was that you should join multiple affiliate programs as long as they are in line with your content strategy.
A lot of affiliate bloggers say that building a topical authority on your blog or affiliate site is the stepping stone to start generating sales.
The way it works is that you test out different topics by publishing a handful of articles across three to four categories.
Once a cluster of topics starts getting traction from search engines, you could double-down on that and write a bunch of more articles on that topic/category and become an authority in that area. That’s how you build topical authority around a certain topic or category.
So several affiliate links or affiliate programs won’t make a difference unless your content is worth paying attention to from the readers’ standpoint.
However, indeed, placing dozens of the same affiliate links in a brief blog post may annoy the readers, so you need to create a balance in that area.
Make sure that your blog doesn’t look pushy when it comes to affiliate product insertion.
We’ve explained what affiliate links are and how they work on affiliate blogs.
The reason why we discussed this topic is that it’s vital to use link cloaking, especially when you’re monetizing blogs with affiliate marketing.
If you have been paying attention to quality content, link building, site design, page speed, and on-page SEO, then you can’t mess up with long and clunky affiliate links.
Several branded URL shorteners and affiliate link cloaking tools are available on the market. Choose the link cloaking tool that provides in-depth reporting and click-tracking so that you keep track of your clicks on the affiliate links.
