Cloaking Affiliate Links Without Breaking Attribution

Affiliate URLs are long, ugly and obviously affiliate. Cloaking — replacing them with a tidy link on your own domain — makes them shareable. It also introduces two failure modes that cost real money, and one that costs accounts.

What cloaking actually is

A redirect on your domain. Someone clicks yoursite.com/go/camera, your server redirects to the affiliate URL, they land on the merchant. The affiliate parameters travel in the redirect; the visitor sees your domain first.

Failure mode 1: parameters get stripped

The expensive one, and it's silent.

Some redirect setups drop the query string. Your affiliate tag, your subID, your tracking parameters — gone. Traffic arrives at the merchant unattributed, they keep the sale, you earn nothing, and nothing appears broken.

Test it every time you change anything: click your own cloaked link, land on the merchant, and read the address bar. Your parameters should still be there. If they're not, that's every commission since the change.

Failure mode 2: the chain gets too long

Cloak, then a shortener, then the network's own redirect, then the merchant. Four hops.

Each hop is latency on mobile, another chance to drop parameters, and a stronger signal to link scanners that this looks like phishing — chains are a hallmark of it. Some scanners stop following partway and judge what they can see.

Keep it to one hop from your link to the destination. If you're already using a network redirect, your cloak should point straight at it, not through anything else.

Failure mode 3: it's not allowed

Some programmes prohibit cloaking outright, and others prohibit the specific pattern of hiding where the visitor is going. Amazon in particular has rules about misrepresenting the destination — see Amazon affiliate links and shorteners.

Read the programme terms before cloaking. "Everyone does it" is not a defence when the account is terminated and the pending commissions go with it.

Disclosure doesn't become optional

Cloaking hides that a link is affiliate. That makes clear disclosure more necessary, not less — both as a legal requirement in many places and as the thing that keeps an audience trusting you.

Disclose near the link, in plain words, before the click. A cloaked affiliate link with no disclosure is the exact pattern regulators and platforms are looking for.

Doing it well

• One hop. Your link to the destination, nothing between.
• Readable, honest back-halves. /go/camera is fine. /free pointing at a paid product is not.
• Verify parameters survive after every change, on every programme.
• Use 302, not 301. Merchants change URLs and programmes change networks; a permanently-cached redirect is one you can never repoint. See redirect types.
• One link per placement, so you know which post earned rather than which product.
• Never delete a cloaked link. It's in old posts you've forgotten. Repoint it at a category page when the product dies.

What it's genuinely good for

Tidiness in text, repointability when a merchant changes URL, click analytics the network won't give you, and the ability to swap programmes without editing every old post.

Those are real benefits. They're just not worth an account, so check the terms first and check your parameters after.

Create trackable links — 302 by default, parameters preserved, click data included.