Why cloak affiliate links?

If you are into affliate marketing it may be a good idea to cloak your affiliate links for several reasons:

• Costomers tend to trust links that don't have an obvious affiliate look about them more.
• If you use pay-per-click advertising uncloaked affiliate links are easy to spot with tools like KeywordSpy. So anyone who is willing to pay for sunscription can see and steal all your keywords.
• If you don't use pay-per-click uncloaked affiliate links are easy to find using a couple of simple search queries. Your competitors can find all your websites by knowing your affiliate ID.

What is referer cloaking and why do I need it?

Referer cloaking is unique feature of this website. Not only you can hide your affiliate ID from your visitors, you can also hide the source of your traffic from the site you are linking to. Sad truth is that often publishers collect information about profitable pay-per-click campaigns or successful websites and later copy them to earn an extra buck. Here is how it works: if you advertise on Yahoo! and send users directly to your affiliate link chances are your publisher will see the referer field that will look something like this:

If you direct users to www.cloakreferer.com redirect with referer cloaking turned on the referer field will be blank. Microsoft adCenter isn't any better