Hi Friends,
Could some expert please advice me, If I shorten my url www.myaffliateUrl.com into a shorten url like goo.gl/xxx , Is it secure?
Can somebody read my affiliate url inside this shorten url? I'm looking for the most secure solution.
Thanks!

I think they can if they add a plus sign in the shortened URL. The plus sign works for goo.gl and bit.ly only I think.

Originally Posted by greenbay

Can somebody read my affiliate url inside this shorten url? I'm looking for the most secure solution.

What does "read my affiliate url" mean? There is no way to hide your affiliate link completely (and there is no reason to do that, I think). You can check the response headers, and find your link.

I dont think its really all that possible mate :/

I have a reason to do that my friend, hide my affliate url means, other people cannot know what is this affiliate network, who is this affiliate person etc. They must see only the shorten url and advertiser's page. Is this really possible to do with some technique or some shorten url service ?

Originally Posted by Glenn BH

What does "read my affiliate url" mean? There is no way to hide your affiliate link completely (and there is no reason to do that, I think). You can check the response headers, and find your link.

nope, you can't completely hide it no matter what technique you use..

however url shortening is enough for the regular surfers..

You can try to make make your own URL shortener, the best solution in my opinion!

If i click on your shortner, and i arrive at the affiliate page, then usually there is a referral sig in the actual url, unless the page then redirects you after the cookie is placed then someone can always find out. If you want to make sure that nobody finds out, then i think you have to go lookup things such as cloaking, but that isn't allowed normally.

A good alternative is to set different affiliate ids per campaign. So nothing can get cross-traced.

Thanks Panther28! You understand my requirement . How to set up different affiliate IDs per campaign?

Any other suggestions guys?

Originally Posted by Panther28

If i click on your shortner, and i arrive at the affiliate page, then usually there is a referral sig in the actual url, unless the page then redirects you after the cookie is placed then someone can always find out. If you want to make sure that nobody finds out, then i think you have to go lookup things such as cloaking, but that isn't allowed normally.

A good alternative is to set different affiliate ids per campaign. So nothing can get cross-traced.

You normally can do this through your control panel, or contact your affiliate manager directly and ask them, just say you are running a split test a/b campaign and you want to compare effectiveness.

Thanks Panther28!

good information collected on this thread, and by the way you can.

There are services that let you know the final destination of a shortened URL before you visit it.

Check out www.monojump.com to shorten your URLs. It's a shortener I created that has a lot of tools specifically for affiliates.

Secure in terms of the referer? NO! You'd have to fake the referer if so.

well no i dont think you can do that you can not hide it completely.