Opportunity: Keyword advertising and Link redirection
March 16, 2008 – 12:09 pmI just found a great way to deal with two problems I had in here. First, I wanted to hide my affiliate links so I would have better SEO. I didn’t want the links to look like affiliate links. With this plugin I found, the redirect is done from a html page that has noindex on it so search engines shouldn’t look at it. Second, I was looking for a way to sell keywords to my Advertisers, just link Kontera does but I wanted to do it by myself. I got one tool that manage both of my problems! It is called Hidden Affiliate v0.2 it is a Wordpress plugin.
Before going any further on the plugin I would like to talk a little bit more why you should want to hide your affiliate links.
Better SEO: the links don’t look like affiliate links, the redirect is done from a html page that has noindex on it so search engines shouldn’t look at it.
Less work: Changing your affiliate links is a lot less work because you have to change in just one place then on hundreds of pages where you use those links
Improve your click rate: It hides the ugly part of affiliate codes. People tend to not trust long links with a lot of characters and unknown codes. A nicely formated and clean link is more likely to be clicked then one that contains an affiliate code in it and it kind of forces them to click the link instead of just typing the link (without your affiliate code ) in the browser.
How the plugin will hide your affiliate links:
It will let you define such redirects from a nice (AJAXy ) web interface inside your wordpress admin. The plugin installs just like any other Wordpress plugin and once installed you can start defining your affiliate link without having to write any code. The plugin uses a meta and javascript redirect inspired by a post on John Chow dot Com about hiding affiliate links for better SEO
Installation
It is really easy to intall. Just copy hidden-affiliate-links.zip and unzip or copy hidden-affiliate-links folder in wp-content/plugins then go to wp-admin -> Plugins and activate the Hidden Affiliate Links plugin
Using the plugin
After you activate the plugin you can go to wp-admin -> Manage -> Hidden Affiliate Links and add/edit/delete hidden affiliate links. For each link you have to define a slug (a destination link/code), keywords and a description.
Manage Hidden Affiliate Links
The “slug” is what the link will look like on your blog, the link/code is the part where the visitor will be redirected, the keywords is is actually a field where you can specify a regular expression ( so make sure you escape special characters like - or . (dot ) by placing a \ ( backslash ) in front of them.) that will contain the link and the description is something to remind you what’s this link about, but it’s also used in the title of the page that’s doing the redirect (in case the redirect does not succeed).
Example: if the slug is go/tla (if you use /go/tla it won’t work) and the link/code is my affiliate link for Text Link Ads http://tinyurl.com/2kasce then if you write a post on your blog and you use a link like http://www.monetizelab.com/go/tla in your post, anyone that clicks that link will be redirected to http://tinyurl.com/2kasce
Why link/code and not just Link? In case you want to hide an affiliate link where you cannot just do a redirect, like adsense referral links that are generated by javascript, then you will have to put the javascript instead of the link.
Because you cannot redirect to a link that is generated by javascript ( because there’s no link until the javascript executes ) you’ll have to redirect to a page where the javascript is inserted and will execute to generate the link. In this case the user will have to actually click the generated link. So if you put anything else then a link ( starting with http or https ) in the link/code box then the script will think this is a code and will not try to redirect to the code but to a page containing the code. You can customize the look of that page by modifying the file redirect_code.php
In case the redirect does no succeed for some reason then you will see a page with the affiliate link in it and the title of the page will be the one specified in the description for the link. You can also customize that page by modifying: redirect_link.php
Advanced Feature
The script is very easy to use but if you want some power and you have some knowledge of writing regular expressions then here’s how you can use it. The slug part can be any regex, and anything that will match that regular expression will be redirected to the real affiliate link.
For example I could make the slug like this: (.+)/tla and everything that ends in /tla like http://www.monetizelab.com/go-to/tla or http://www.monetizelab.com/recommended/tla, would be redirected to my text-link ads affiliate link. Or something like go/(tla|text-link-ads) would match both links like http://www.monetizelab.com/go/tla and http://www.monetizelab.com/go/text-link-ads
Selling Keywords
Do you think Bank of America would like to have all the words like bank, cash, money with a link to their website? How much would they pay for it? Now with this plugin you can sell keywords to your advertisers. I’m already doing it at Advertise.
Let’s say you write a post and you want this plugin to replace both the keywords Hostgator and Hosting then the content of the keywords column should look like Hosting|Hostgator . The “Match slug” field can be go/hostgator and the “New link” should be something like “/go/hostgator” or “http://www.monetizelab.com/go/hostgator” ( without the quotes ).
Yes, all words Hosting and Hostgator are linked not because I manually linked them but because the plugin is in action.
Click here to download Hidden Affiliate v0.2 and start using it.
If you have any other questions you can visit the developer website
