The best affiliate link cloaking WordPress plugins that will help you to mask long affiliate links with your own domain name making it safer from the SEO perspective.
You might be aware of the fact that affiliate links are somewhat ugly. And if the links aren’t alluring, then your readers will refrain from clicking it ergo, you will end up earning less money.
Furthermore, long and clumsy links also hamper your SEO performance. So what’s the solution to this problem?
Well, say hello to link cloaking. When you cloak an affiliate link, you are basically hiding your link behind another link which here is supposed to be shorter and clearer, which gains assurance from your readers.
Now, if you have your affiliate business is running on a WordPress website, then here are some awesome plugins to help your cloak the links.
So without further ado, here are the Best Affiliate Link Cloaking WordPress Plugins:
Why Should You Cloak Affiliate Links
Now, this is an important question because this process will increase a little work for you; so why should you do that?
I am sure if you go for cloaking your affiliate links it will increase your work by one minute for each link but it is time worth investing. If you don’t cloak the affiliate links, your site might get into trouble in the near future because search engine like Google doesn’t like ugly affiliate links.
You must mask the affiliate links from the SEO point of view as well as the user experience. For example, if you are writing about ten affiliate products in a post without cloaking the links, your site will look spammy and filled with advertisements.
The short and clean masked links will make those links look much better and it will never affect the SEO of your site. So, invest that extra one minute to make your site safe, here are some of the best affiliate link cloaking plugins that will make the process a lot easier for you.
Also, don’t forget to check this collection of the best WordPress affiliate themes that will surely help your business grow.
What Are The Best Affiliate Link Management Plugins?
01. Thirsty Affiliate WordPress Plugin
Thirsty Affiliate is one of the most popular link cloaking plugins which gets used by most professionals. You get to manage all your cloaked links from a central panel.
It is also very easy to use, and you will be able to seamlessly create affiliate links, customize them, choose your desired prefix and then insert them into your pages, posts and comments as well.
Some notable features of the plugin include the option to open the links in a new window, integrate a 301 affiliate link redirect, include category slugs into the URLs, include Dofollow/Nofollow options, and loads more.
Do read our detailed review of Thirsty Affiliate plugin.
02. Lasso
Lasso is one of the most comprehensive affiliate management plugins for WordPress. If you are monetizing your site with an affiliate program like Amazon, this can be a very handy plugin to display products and manage the overall setup.
Lasso comes with some very useful features to help you increase your revenue and optimize your affiliate products in the correct way.
It offers you an option to scan your site and add affiliate links to the desired keywords on automation helping you to make more money with the same amount of your traffic.
Another advantage is that you can create beautiful product display blocks to attract more clicks while keeping everything transparent. It comes with multiple themes to choose from when it comes to your product display.
You can also create display blocks and add your affiliate products to show them on all other posts on your site with the image, link, and text on those blocks with a clear indication that the user is going to click on an affiliate product link.
Overall, Lasso is a very important plugin when it comes to managing and improving revenue from any affiliate site.
The affiliate link cloaking option is one of the many features that the Lasso plugin has to offer. You can create SEO-friendly short URLs for all your affiliate links using the Lasso plugin.
03. Pretty Link Pro
Pretty Link Pro is one of the most powerful and premium affiliate link cloaking plugins which not only let you cloak your links but also help to track, organize, share and test all of them.
All the links can be easily accessed through the admin interface. You will get options to group, sort, search and track the clicks on all the links.
Furthermore, there is the option to do automotive repetitive tasks. You can also automate the creation of short links for all your posts and pages and then automatically tweet a customizable message to as many Twitter accounts as you want.
04. URL Shortener Pro
URL Shortener Pro helps you to – shorten URLs and cloak the links in the process. The plugin will also help you quickly remember the short links.
One of the highlighting features of the plugin is that it uses Javascript with all the redirects which means you can add different functionalities to the redirects if you like.
Some of the different redirection methods used by the plugin include 302 temporary, 307 temporary, and 301 permanent. You can also set the links to no-follow which will restrict spiders and trackers from following your links.
Other advanced features of the plugin include the ability to information on like devices, referer, OS, clicks, and tracks by URL.
05. Affiliate Links WordPress Plugin
With Affiliate Links WordPress Plugin you will be able to shorten internal and external links as well as get details like the number of times a user has clicked on the link, what browser they are using, the respective language, the conditional redirects, and much more.
With all this data, you will be able to personalize your redirect URLs to resonate better with your user base.
With the plugin, you can even use all your affiliate links as shortcodes, widgets, HTML/shortcode generators. Besides this, the plugin also comes with Google Analytics tracking, recent and popular affiliate links, link click stats, and much more.
06. EasyAzon
If you are a regular user of the Amazon affiliate market then this plugin is for you. Once you get this plugin, you can use it on an unlimited number of sites.
There are marketers who create amazing Amazon affiliate websites and flip them on marketplaces like Flippa to make quick money if you have the same business model you can use this plugin on all those sites once you purchase the license.
This plugin makes the use of the Amazon marketplace a lot easier for you as an affiliate. This plugin will help you to add the no-follow attribute to the links, cloak the affiliate links, make them open in a new window as well as display product pop-ups.
This plugin also helps you with product localization, which means when a user visits your site from the UK, the user will be redirected to the UK store automatically.
And the best part is that you will get 30 days risk-free money-back guarantee in case you don’t like the plugin.
07. Easy Affiliate Links
Easy Affiliate Links allows you to seamlessly manage all your affiliate links and shorten/cloak them right from one place.
Notable features of the plugin include the ability to easily access all your links in the visual and HTML editor in WordPress. You can also assign categories to your links, keep track of monthly or lifetime clicks, and also import affiliate links from XML.
08. WP Dynamic Links
WP Dynamic Links is a free yet advanced WordPress plugin for cloaking affiliate links. It can help you shorten the links as well as track them and help you do split testing.
Some notable features of the plugin include the option to get click reports which let you know where all your clicks are coming from. It can also help you turn your keywords into links which is always a plus.
09. WP Wizard Cloak
A very simple and free link cloaking WordPress plugin that will help you to create optimized affiliate links on your site.
The process is quick and simple. Go to the plugin admin panel once you activate the plugin, enter the link that you wish to create like www.yourdomain.com/test-link set the destination URL which is the affiliate link, and save it.
Though the plugin is free and simple, it does offer you all the important features like tracking the number of clicks on your optimized URLs.
The plugin also offers you the option to create country-specific URLs and send your users from different countries to different URLs.
10. Simple URLs
A complete URL management plugin for your WordPress site. This plugin offers you the option to redirect any URL on your site and mask it according to your requirements.
After the installation, this plugin will add a new custom post type on your WP admin backend that you can use to create SEO-friendly URLs on your site.
11. ClickerVolt
ClickerVolt is another comprehensive affiliate link management plugin for WordPress that you can use to cloak your affiliate links and add custom variables to the links for making them and to track them better.
This plugin is not just about link cloaking but it offers a wide range of features to track all the affiliate links and send traffic to different pages based on different parameters like geolocation and others.
The ClickerVolt plugin comes with the option to track a number of different data from the link clicks. You can track data such as country, region, city, zip code, timezone, language, IP address, and a number of other important data.
This plugin can be very handy while managing your affiliate sites. And the best part is that you can get all these features even in the free version of the plugin.
12. Auto Affiliate Links
If you wish to add your affiliate links to the blog posts with keywords that can be targeted with your affiliate account, this is the plugin you need.
A very handy plugin that gives you the option to set your preferred keywords that you wish to be linked automatically when it is present in your content.
You also have the option to links to be clocked as per your need. You will get this option in the general settings of the plugin.
FAQs About Link Cloaking
01. What is link cloaking
Link cloaking is a process of shortening long affiliate URLs to make them SEO-friendly. Often the users use own domain names to mask the long affiliate URLs.
02. Should I cloak my affiliate links?
Yes, the process of cloaking the affiliate link is a good practice that helps in a number of ways. Search engines don’t like long affiliate links, so creating a prettier link will have SEO benefits. Also, if you have listed 50 products on a page, having 50 affiliate links will make your page look spammy.
It will also help you to reduce revenue stealing by malware.
03. Should I nofollow affiliate links?
Yes, you should nofollow the affiliate links on a page as it is not going to get you any SEO benefit. Also, a number of dofollow affiliate links might negatively impact your site.
04. How should I cloak my affiliate links?
You can use any of the plugins we have listed in this article. Thirsty Affiliate, Pretty Link are some of the most widely used link cloaking plugins.
In Conclusion:
So this was our list of the best affiliate link cloaking plugin for WordPress. Do let us know how you liked the plugins cited here and if you are aware of a few more powerful plugins that should have been mentioned then do be afraid to let us know in the comments section below.
Your contribution will also prove to be helpful to your fellow readers.
