What is Hiding Affiliate Links? How to optimise this in SEO?
Hiding affiliate links is hiding long, complex URLs that are difficult to memorise and understand and using a simple, clean, and more clear link that redirects the users to affiliate products. This significantly impacts user experience and link management of the website, ultimately affecting its SEO performance. Here in this article, we will look at what is hiding affiliate links and how to optimise them in SEO.
What is Hiding Affiliate Links? How to optimise this in SEO?
Hiding affiliate links simply is using simple and clean relevant links instead of long and complex URLs to redirect the traffic to the affiliate product, ensuring users do not have to go through learning or understanding long, complex URLs. In simple words, the end destination is the same: the path to be there is converted into a more user-friendly and simple path.
Hiding affiliate links has two main purposes in Search Engine Optimisation.
User Friendliness
Unlike long and complex links, shorter, clear, and simple links are often more user-friendly. Moreover, they also inspire and appeal to users, ultimately increasing click-through rates. Alternatively, long and cumbersome affiliate links sometimes appear as spam, refraining users from clicking on them.
Link Management And Protection
If an affiliate program updates a simple, modified, and single-cloaked link, it makes it easier for the management and tracking of the links. Moreover, this cloaking also helps in protecting against hijacking. Because these are simple and clear codes, malicious actors are unable to replace the affiliate IDs with their own to steal your profit.
Hiding Affiliate Links And SEO
Hiding affiliate links is a significant step that you can take to impact your SEO performance positively. It provides users with a better user experience.
You have to make sure to follow Google Webmaster Guidelines while hiding affiliate links to avoid any penalties. Otherwise, it may result in affecting your website negatively.
Moreover, keep in mind to use the “nofollow” attribute when cloaking affiliate links because this signals search engines not to pass link equity to the destination URL. This helps prevent link schemes from affecting your website.
Hiding Affiliate Links Best Practices
- To hide affiliate links, you need to make sure to cloak links that are simple, easy, relevant, and convenient to understand.
- It would be better for you to go with reputable link-cloaking tools to get secure redirects.
- Furthermore, also avoid over-cloaking because there is no need to cloak every link present on your site.
- Additionally, make sure to build trust and transparency when cloaking the affiliate links. This not only helps in following the Webmasters Guideline but also building trust among users.
- Track the performance of your website now and then to check for the effectiveness and efficiency of the cloaked links and to see whether they need any adjustments or not
FAQs
Conclusion
Hiding affiliate links is an effective strategy that you can use to benefit your website SEO performance because it positively impacts click-through rates and user experience. The only thing you have to keep in mind is to focus on the importance of ethical practices and transparency that you have to follow to avoid getting penalised by search engines. The above article tells you about what is hiding affiliate links and how it affects SEO performance.