Hi all,
If you are just putting your ugly looking affiliate links on your pages then I can guarantee that you are losing commissions! Some people will either chop off your affiliate ID or replace it with theirs.
Here’s a quick and easy way to hide affiliate links on any web page. This method will not only work on your own sites, but will also work on Squidoo, Weebly etc where they would normally strip any code that you may use to hide your links using other methods. (NOTE 
oesn’t work on Hubpages)
Just paste the following code into your page, you just need to change your affiliate link:-
<img style=”border: 0px;” src=”http://yourID.merchantID.hop.clickbank.net/” alt=”" width=”1″ height=”1″ />
Now as you can see the above code is what you would use to insert an image into your webpage, but instead of a link to an image you have your affiliate URL, so whenever someone loads your page it drops the affiliate cookie on their computer, the code is completely invisible to the visitor.
You can add this code anywhere on a page, the advantage is that you can just have your merchant link visable such as http://www.some-merchant-link.com and people won’t know that you are getting a commission if they click on the link and make a purchase.
Neil
See Also:-
Hiding Affiliate Links With A Redirect Script
How to Hide Affiliate Links
This is resourceful thanks for sharing. I’m always having a tough time with coding and this one looks great in hiding my affiliate link.
I love this idea….how to you ensure it’s working, though?
If your vendor has some kind of inhouse tracking, you can test it that way, I use this method with different vendors and haven’t run into any problems, having said that, always test to make sure you are getting credit for those commissions.
Neil
I tried but it didn’t work with my Click bank ID. When proceeding to the payment page I only saw “Affiliate = title” and not my ID.
Can I use it with amazon also? Is the code still the same?
Is it still working to you?
Thanks!
I use this code all the time and it works great.
Not sure why you see “Affiliate = title” because if it wasn’t tracking it would show as “Affiliate = None”.
Send me the link of the page you are trying this technique on and I will check it out for you.
I can’t see why it wouldn’t work for Amazon.
Neil
Thanks a lot Neil,
I still dont know why the Affiliate ID=”title”. Now it’s working perfectly since I changed the CB product. I think possibly the previous product’s page was hacked or something, and all of the cookie of other affiliates are cleared and overwritten by this guy “title”.
I changed to other products and now it’s working fine. If you also marketing CB products, stay away from the product “Calling men – know when and how calling a man in your life”.
Thanks a bunch!
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
Glad you have got it working, I checked out the other site and they are stealing commissions just as you said, thanks for letting people know!
Neil
Hi again Neil,
(I bookmarked your page)
I want to ask how do you insert this code in hubpages? I couldn’t find a place.
Thanks a bunch mate!
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
When you are editing your hubpages, click on the little “HTML” button on the tool bar you can then just paste your code in there.
Always check that it’s working OK before you promote your page.
Neil
Hi again Neil,
No…I tried but there’s no place to put HTML on Hubpages. What toolbar was you talking about? There’s no HTML capsule to add, there’s a place to add HTML in the “text” capsule, but the number of HTML tags allowed is very limited, and the tag for picture is not there.
Thanks anyway, if you know some way to get around with this, please keep me updated
Cheers,
Kelly
I’m very sorry Kelly, my mistake, doesn’t work on Hubpages because they strip the tags, the only way to hide your affiliate link is to either buy a domain name from namecheap.com which costs $8 and set it up to redirect to your affiliate link or your own website, or set up a opt-in page or offer at somewhere like Weebly.com .
I prefer to use my own domains on Hubpages and other sites like it, firstly it looks better, and secondly I can track where and what is making the commissions, I can even see which keywords where used to find my site and get the sale! You can’t do this sending traffic directly to the merchant site, plus your site might as well get all the link love.
Neil
Hi Neil,
It’s Kelly again. Thanks a lot for your answer about Hubpages. I have been using this affiliate link hiding technique and was wondering that if it is safe in the long term because it is kind of cookie stuffing isn’t it? Have you used this method with CB products? Have you got any bad experience with it or it’s safe and we will not be banned from CB or something?
Thanks a lot pal, I have learned so much from your blog.
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
Aslong as you are only dropping the cookie for the offer that the person is actually reading on your page then you shouldn’t have any problems at all, however if you are adding dozens of cookies for other products then that is cookie stuffing which is a big no no.
I mainly promote CB products and haven’t had any problems, CB turn a blind eye to alot of things anyway, however, if you are promoting something like CJ programs then read their terms because CJ are very strict.
Neil
Hi Neil
Interesting to read your notes on hiding affiliate links. Please see if you could be of help with this problem. I have affiliate links published under “blogroll”(renamed this on my site) in WP. So these appear as simple links on my home page and every other page. But when you hover over the link, the affiliate URL shows up on the bottom left.
Is there a way to mask this?
Cheers
Raj
Hi Raj,
You need to be on this page How to Hide Affiliate Links as there is some code on there that will do just that job!
Neil
Great stuff, and was wondering about the .htaccess coding you have on that other page.
Is there a particular place that you need to place that code?
I’ve tried it pretty much everywhere on each line but with no luck.
Now saying that
I have lot’s of product that each “gif” has it’s own unique IDcode..example:
http://astore.amazon.com/affiliatelinkhere/detail/slgjk33920
each one of the products has a different code(the last number
Do I have to insert the full URL for EACH piece of product I have? or can it be used generically?
redirect 301 /Insert Cute name here http://astore.amazon.com/affiliateID
and if I have different affiliates for the page say 3, do I have to put that code into the .htaccess file for each affiliate
http://astore.amazon.com/affiliateID
http://affiliateID.clickbank
http://someID.yetAnotherAffiliate
Thanks…just a little wierd trying to mask a page with 50+ products
I am new to all of this. So this may be a dumb question – What is a CB product and a CJ product.
Thanks
Hi Tom,
It’s not a dumb question Tom, CB is Clickbank clickbank.com and CJ is commission Junction cj.com
Neil
@Dluzional
You put the code into your htaccess file not on the webpage it is used for redirecting traffic whereas the code on this page is for dropping a cookie onto your visitors computer.
If you are using the above code on a page with many products you will have to use it for each product.
I don’t use Amazon so please make sure the tracking works as with any other vendor before using it.
Neil
Thanks for the follow up…
and the .htaccess file was where the line of coding was being put,..
Maybe it’s an amazon thing, but there’s no hiding that affiliate link at all regardless of where that line of code is in the .htaccess file.
I’ve tried it on each line from the top to the bottom with the same result.
Affiliate link still shows up
And to do this with every product?? hmm..amazon pulls in several pages of product of at least 8 to a page, so going to have to find another way around this methinks.
Thanks again, appreciate the info.
Where exactly do you insert this in Weebly?
Hi Anton,
Look for the “custom HTML” function when you are editing your page, it’s under the “more” section, just paste the code in.
Couldn’t get it to hide. Although I used bit.ly to rename the url differently.
Not sure why it’s not working for you Anton, I use this technique alot, if I get time I will make a quick video showing how to add the code to pages.
I was able to change my “Click Here” link just fine with another method you recommened, but in Weebly, I don’t see a way to modify the picture links by adding the code above.
Have you managed to get this code working OK now Anton? The only bit you need to change in the code above is your URL.
Not for the picture links in Weebly. Only the text links. I’m not sure if there is a way in weebly to hide the links when you hover over the pictures. The mechanics are different than modifying a regular index.html file. Unless you know of a different way?
Hi Neil,
Why you deleted the links from this post? Is there any problem?
Which links do you mean Kelly? I haven’t deleted any as far as I know.
Neil
Oh so you haven’t deleted it. “Just paste the following code into your page, you just need to change your affiliate link:”, after this point there is no code to see from my browser (firefox).
“Just paste the following code into your page, you just need to change your affiliate link:- ?” what ? I can’t see the code? why did you removed it ???
Hi there “PP”, I didn’t remove the code, for some reason WordPress decided it wasn’t going to display it anymore even though all the code was visable in the back office, I had to re enter all the code for it to show up,not a clue why it happened, many thanks for letting me know.
Neil
Hi Neil,
I try to hide my amazon aff.link using a code you gave us , but it did not work for me . I am confused . If you could help me to solve the problem I would be happy !
Thanks a lot
Irma