Beware of Cloaking Plugins

[godspeed007]

It's regarding one of my affiliate sites. Everything was fine until last week and suddenly I saw huge drop in sales. I audited the whole funnels and at last found that I have been using a cloaking WordPress plugin where I used to mask the aff links. I decided to put my ugly aff URL directly with nofollow tag in place of the masked URL in the whole website yesterday. I suddenly got many sales after irregular sales for a week which cannot be a coincidence which means the cloaking plugin might have been sending a part of traffic to elsewhere every day or something shady I can smell here.

What do you guys say?

 

[Word Wizard]

Mind saying the plugin name?

 

[godspeed007]

Pretty Link Lite

Mind saying the plugin name?

 

[Dioni]

Be aware from what you are using, read plugin reviews before installing.

 

[BIGBIGBIGMamas]

Shit... I've been wondering the same thing

Pretty Link Lite

 

[godspeed007]

Did you find similar occurrence of drop in sales?

It might also be the case that they have been doing it since the first day I installed it.

Shit... I've been wondering the same thing

 

[nimdekvan]

Holy sh*t
I use it too.
And my rank is going very good from page 3 to page 1
When my ranking is on page 2 I got a lot of sales....Then suddenly it's gone for almost 1 month.
I thought I have a problem with my product owner.(I send a complain email regarding they change the currency without notifying me)
But they said there was nothing wrong with my account (even if they disabled my account, they won't say it tho.)
Now I'm on page 1 but sales is worse than when I was at page 2 WTF.
I'm going to remove them now. (btw the time my sales drop is around 29 Apr to 3 Jun -- I know its a very long period ,but the price of the product is very high so the sale doesn't come often, thats why I waited for a very long time)

 

[lelou00]

I don't know whether it's due to the plugin or my CTR is reaaallly low. My daily visitor is about >250/day. But amount of clicks to Amazon is just around 40-50 (the highest is 60). Based on this stats, my ctr is just around 20%.

Maybe I should try using raw affiliate links instead of using Pretty link to see any changes.

 

[sikandar]

You can use 301 redirect using htaccess and create your own pretty links easily.

 

[poolson]

did you go through the plugin code to see if the traffic was being siphoned off anywhere?

 

[Sir Sebastian]

Has anyone experienced this with other plug ins?

 

[InterZone]

Allways be weary of plugins that don't have a lot of feedback.

 

[WebHostKing]

OMG I Had same issue.. I'm removing them

 

[LiquidSnake]

WTF same issue here, thanks guys!

 

[Evolzation]

You can use 301 redirect using htaccess and create your own pretty links easily.

Hi thank you for the tip where can I go to learn how to do this the right way?

 

[Jeffersontalks]

Makes perfect sense. Since the developer will have to make money somehow. Nothing is free in this world. If there is something free than the product would be you.

 

[yugejackpots]

Just download Simple 301 redirects and set a 301 to your affiliate link. It's the same thing as cloaking aff links... Except it won't mess up.