Am I missing something? Clickbank hop encoding, HopLink Shield URL

[CashMoneyMantra]

The clickbank hop encoder, HopLink Shield - what's the point of it? When you click it the hop appears in the URL anyway, so what protection is there? I'm aware that you can decode them and look at the bottom of the page anyway, but this is more because it looks unprofessional sitting in the address bar from the customers point of view and makes it glaringly obviously that it's affiliate sales, rousing suspicion.

Pretty annoying because they make a big song and dance at sign up about how your name is really unimportant and you can put literally anything in there, then they ban you for registering a new account (presumably when you're making fat return commissions). I would have gone with a gibberish name if I had known this.

I know you can hide it as a vendor, do they tell vendors how to do this? Is this the fault of lazy vendors more than anything?

 

[rjd1265]

They do this because of commission jacking from other unethical affiliates or vendors...

All you need to do is mask it with a tinyurl or buy a domain and forward your ugly affiliate link to your nice looking domain.

 

[rees9]

I have some shielded urls as a destination url for a tracking program, but the final result still shows my affiliate name !

With some vendors you can hide your aff name by appending ?clear=1 to your url (xxx.xxxx.clickbank.net/?clear=1)

 

[CashMoneyMantra]

They do this because of commission jacking from other unethical affiliates or vendors...

All you need to do is mask it with a tinyurl or buy a domain and forward your ugly affiliate link to your nice looking domain.

Thanks for the reply, I was going to ask some obvious questions, but then realised you had pointed me in the right direction and did some research. This never occurred to me as I don't plan on hosting my own stuff right now. Do people basically run searches for vendor URLs with hops on the end? Couldn't the same be done with the encrypted version or does the encrypted vendor ID change for each user?

I have some shielded urls as a destination url for a tracking program, but the final result still shows my affiliate name !

With some vendors you can hide your aff name by appending ?clear=1 to your url (xxx.xxxx.clickbank.xxx/?clear=1)

Ah, this is great! I had a look around for this but couldn't find it. I assume the easiest way to find these vendors is to just try it yourself?

 

[Wonka9]

Get a cheap domain and mask it you can do this on pretty much any domain vendor.