Affiliate Link Cloaking

How?

[myrrh]

There are several threads here mentioning aff link cloaking but none that I could find that tells me how.

Just to make sure I'm talking about the right thing, I want to prevent aff hijacking by people viewing the source code.

Could someone point me to a source that tells how or recommend software that does this?

[JoshInTX]

I find the easiest way to do this is to send it to another page on your site that has a response.redirect in asp or using header( "Location in php. (I don't like javascript, so I have never done it with that, but it could be done.)
basically you would have your regular page with all your content and then when they click a link to xyz merchant they are sent somewhere like: www.yourdomain.com/sendtoxyz.php and then the code on that page (sendtoxyz.php) would be:

<?php
header( "Location: YourAffiliateLinkWithHTTPHere");
?>

That is if you are using php of course. same thing applies for asp, make the affiliate links go to www.yourdomain.com/sendtoxyz.asp and then your page sendtoxyz.asp would simply be:

<%
Response.redirect("YourAffiliateLinkWithHTTPHere")
%>

[arran]

Remember to disallow sendtoxyz.php (or sendtoxyz.asp) in robots.txt

arran.

[Shawn Collins]

I like .htaccess redirects, as I can easily manage all of my redirects for a site in one file.

Search for ".htaccess redirect" and there will be sites that explain how to set it up.

[flobaby]

Clicktracker from Focalmedia works great. It's a free cgi program and uses a MySql database.