How to Hide Affiliate Links in WordPress

Hiding the affiliate link in wordpress is an usual practice these days. It is also known as cloaking or masking the links. Some says it is a part of professional blogging and SEO while others recommend it to increase clicks and enhance sales. Apart from these reasons, I would say that most of the affiliate links looks awkward to read-out. Isn’t it?

You can use GoCodes plugin in wordpress to hide your affiliate links. This is the most popular, simple to use and free plugin to cloak your affiliate links. It redirects your affiliate links to the product homepage and the visitors will just see the ‘professional’ GoCodes in the browser address bar!

Example

If you are an affiliate of WPWebHost, your affiliate link would be as follows:

http://wpwebhost.com/affiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=###

Using this plugin, you can create a cloak link for the above as follows:

http://www.tipsblogger.com/go/WPWebHost/

How to Create GoCodes

1. Download and Activate the GoCodes plugin.

2. Go to Tools – Gocodes from your wordpress dashboard and create gocodes as shown in the screenshots below.

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There is also an option to track the number of hits on these GoCodes. Why don’t you try this simple and free plugin before going for paid ones!

Download Link: GoCodes

Enjoy blogging!

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9 Responsesto “How to Hide Affiliate Links in WordPress”

1. Gerri says:

   July 10, 2010 at 4:07 am

   I used to use plugins to hide affiliate links until the developer just disappeared and did not update the plugin. With subsequent versions of wordpress it caused a few problems so I had to get rid of it. What I now do is similar to this post by Rosalind Gardner – http://netprofitstoday.com/blog/how-to-cloak-yo…
2. Donna says:

   July 12, 2010 at 1:27 pm

   Since this is hot topic. Another Word Press Plugin that I have been using is called “Pretty Links” it is very user friendly and you are able to name the link anything that you want. I personally think its great.
3. Shafar@TipsBlogger says:

   July 12, 2010 at 4:47 pm

   @Gerri
   It's working fine for me. Anyways, thanks for sharing the tutorial here.
   Regards.
4. Shafar@TipsBlogger says:

   July 12, 2010 at 4:49 pm

   @Donna
   'Pretty Link' is also another great plugin, but I'm addicted to this. Lol!
   Thanks for dropping by.
5. Avik says:

   September 12, 2010 at 10:57 pm

   I just installed in my blog, it shows error after activation – “The plugin generated 1189 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin.” BTW I am using wordpress 3.0.1.
6. Shafar says:

   September 13, 2010 at 2:09 pm

   @Avik
   Sorry to hear that. You can report it here:
   http://wordpress.org/tags/gocodes?forum_id=10
7. justdoitrocky says:

   September 19, 2010 at 7:36 am

   I got the same error.

   You can uninstall gocodes, then install gocodes again fix the error.
8. Ogham says:

   October 29, 2010 at 4:07 am

   I used to use gocodes but now I’ve changed my WordPress theme to Thesis which has seo out of the box and has an automatic redirect for affiliate links.
   Cheers.
9. DesktopATM says:

   May 28, 2011 at 11:40 am

   Hi Shafar,
   What a great tip. Being an avid affiliate marketer, I’m going to get GoCodes for the WordPress sites I don’t have the Thesis theme installed on. Thanks!