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I was over at Toast & Egg & Me blog the other day ( a frequent read of mine), and he was discussing ways to hide your affiliate links. I commented to him that I was sure there was a plugin for Wordpress somewhere out there that would make this pretty easy from the admin control panel so I set out on a search to see if there was one. I did finally come across “Hidden Affiliate Links Plugin” which is what I was looking for.

I installed the “Hidden Affiliate Links Plugin“, and made sure to read the instructions over at the plugins website. I actually had to read them a few times as I could not understand from the instructions given what exactly I was suppose to be doing. Maybe it was the way I read the instructions or they way they were wrote, but for the life of me I just did not get them. I did some looking around and playing with the plugin and finally figured it out. I will give some instructions on this below.

Why to hide your affiliate links?
Some people agree with these methods and others do not. It’s up to you which side you stand on. If you would prefer shorter, nice looking urls (http://www.affiliatesite.com/idsomethinghere?0850948540980 vs. http://yoursite.com/go/here ) or if are afraid of affiliate theft then this is a good method to follow. I like the nicer looking urls vs. the long affiliate link.

How to get Hide Affiliate Links plugin to work?
The first thing you need to do is download the plugin from here and upload it in you your wp-content/plugins folder and go to you admin panel and activate the plugin.

You will need to add a fix to the new version for it to work. Go to your plugin editor and click on the “Hidden Affiliate Links” and change the following code.

$hal_version=0.1;

to

$hal_version=0.2;

Then save your change.

Next go to your admin manage area and find the Hidden Affiliate Links. You will see a few options.

Match Slug - This will be the URL you will use in your post so it will look something like - go/adtoll or recommend/adtoll so you deeside on what your link will look like.

Replace Keywords - You can add what keywords you would like to replace with a new link.

New Link - This is a new link for the replacement keywords.

Redirect to Link/Code - This is where you put your original affiliate link (http://seobook.com/458490.html or whatever your affiliate code is) .

Description - Add your links description.

So for example. I have an affiliate link (http://myaffiliate.com/458069) and I would like it to say (http://mysite.com/go/affiliate) I would simply add my Match Slug (go/affiliate) and add the  (http://myaffiliate.com/458069)  to my Redirect to Link/Code.

Here is a Screenshot of my panel:

Now the only bad part to this whole thing is you will now need to go back in to all of your post and change the link of your affiliates to your Match Slug - http://yoursite.com/go/adtoll or simply add /go/adtoll.

Screenshot:

Now you will have a nice redirect URL to your affiliates links.

There are other methods out there if you would prefer a different method like .htaccess, php header(“Location“), and tinyurls, but I like the plugin sense it ’s quick easier for me to just head over to my control panel and add or modify the links from there.

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