What is cloaking?

Link cloaking is essentially the act of hiding the link you want visitors to go to without them actually seeing that link. You do that by designating another link that is more appealing than the link you're trying to hide. There are a few reasons you might want to do this:

1. Your link is an affiliate link and you don't want people to know you're making commissions off of their purchase.

2. Your link is really long/ugly and people might not trust it so you need a link that looks similar to what most people are used to.

2. You don't want someone else to change the affiliate code in your link to their code, which would allow them to steal your commissions.

Cloaking can be accomplished by:

1. Php coding

2. Software

3. Paid cloaking service

Changing the Php coding is a good method but if you're lazy like me you'd rather have software that does it for you. I've tried different types of software but have found certain flaws in the ones I've used (like not redirecting to the right landing page). So I'm now using a paid service that works much better and it's not too expensive ($9 a month for a basic plan). If you're interested in trying out the service I use I can send you a link to it.

Hope that was helpful. Cheers to you and your success.

Is there any downside to using a cloaking service?

Great information! Thank you. This thread is very helpful for newbies like I am. I wonder whether links cloaking and shortenning your urls (deep link) are basically the same things, only the latter is less a broad concept. I think I could never risk website cloaking because i do not want to put my website under risk, so links cloaking is more relevant. If some one could enlighten me and give me some useful info I would be grateful. Thanks in advance.