Cloaking vs Cloaking

Como sugiere el título de la página, hay dos significados comunes de la palabra "camuflaje" en relación con el marketing de afiliación.

We’ve received a number of inquiries about our “Cloak” redirect type in Pretty Links, and how it is different from any other type of redirect. We will cover that in more detail below.

But first, let’s start by understanding the word cloak itself. To cloak means to hide, cover, or disguise something.

So by that meaning, aren’t all shortened links of any redirect type technically cloaked? YES!

La forma más común de encubrimiento: acortar enlaces con redireccionamientos

To shorten a long, ugly affiliate link down to a shorter/prettier URL is a form of cloaking. In fact when you scour the internet on the matter you’ll find that more times than not, when the author of an article mentions “cloaking”, they’re referring simply to any kind of link shortening.

Link shortening is a great way to “cloak” your affiliate links and create short memorable URLs that are easy to share. But it goes beyond that, they also help prevent commission hijacking by masking (cloaking) your affiliate ID from commission hijacking scripts. So, if you’re interest is in protecting your affiliate links from commission hijacking, whilst also benefiting from pretty and easy to remember URLs – then any form of link shortening will do.

Forma menos común de camuflaje - Enmascaramiento de la URL de destino

So what’s the other form of cloaking? The other form of cloaking is actually hiding the target URL from the visitor, such that they cannot see it in their address bar, even after clicking on your shortened affiliate link. There’s a couple of ways to do this, but Pretty Links does it with iFrames. Pretty Links includes an additional redirect type for this called “Cloak”. This redirect type will load the target URL in an iFrame thereby hiding the Target URL from the user’s address bar. This form of cloaking has largely been frowned upon by many merchants and SEO experts and is generally not recommended for affiliate marketing. In fact many merchants have taken measures to block this form of cloaking completely.

¿Qué tipo debo utilizar?

Le recomendamos encarecidamente que utilice los tipos de redirección 301/307 o Meta Refresh/Javascript para acortar y ocultar sus enlaces. Los iFrames siguen teniendo su lugar y sus razones, pero son escasos y poco frecuentes. Pulse aquí para ver un desglose de los distintos tipos de redireccionamientos.

¿Sigue confuso? Pulse aquí to reach out to our support, and we’ll do our best to answer your questions!