No problem, Jonathon.

My belief is that quality score is not impacted by redirects as long as they are not cloaking the final URL (fooling the user), cookie stuffing (stealing commissions), or mismatched with the add. That last one means that your final url has to match the display URL. The intermediate url (the cloaking URL) does not need to match.

HOWEVER — I am not a PPC guy. All of my experiences with PPC have been painful .

Apologies if you don’t like people “reopening” old posts, but I’ve always wondered if Google spots php redirects and the like, and lowers your PPC quality scores…

What do you think? I haven’t tested this yet, but will do so soon. Would be interesting if it gave a point of QS… but if it did I would have thought it would be common knowledge by now!

Cheers,
Jonathon

I’ll keep an eye or two on your blog 🙂

It is a great way to go because it looks clean and professional. It also allows you to change where the link points to if you need to.

The only possible issue would be tracking. It is good to be able to track the number of clicks and where they are coming from. If you can do that (using GA or something), then I would says that your solution is just as good as mine.

I create a subdomain for each affilliate link that I have. Do you think this is a good way to go?

cheers
Tony

@Mark — I am big into “full disclosure” and transparency. Glad to hear you agree with that.

@Garry — Eat more beef!

@Christian — I completely agree with that, but must admit that I had never considered it. That’s really another reason that I like this method — I think “recommends” in the URL gives a clean look. Thanks!

@linuxhat — excellent point that I did not mention here. Thanks for adding that. This is absolutely critical in many case – especially PPC.

I need to make room for a guest appearance from the Cow Slayer on Wed.

Oh cool, so we’re having a cook out on Wednesday. Wonderful!!! Tell you what, I’ll bring the steak and you bring the drinks… only thing I need to know is how you like your COW cooked. 🙂

@Josh. Thank you very much sir. I agree with you completely, but I keep seeing link cloaking products based completely on “theft deterrence.” Guess we just don’t get it. LOL

@Megan. Thank you. Completely agree with you. This has happened to me more than once already – usually because an affiliate changes domain names or software. Some people take this even further, and make the link completely generic — “To see my current recommendation for autoresponders, click here…” I don’t really do that, but it can make sense in things like eBooks where you completely lose control of the link.

So much to do, so little time :)…. need to make money too 🙁

hth ~megan

It’s always humorous to hear people say they cloak links to hide the fact that it’s an affiliate link. If someone wants to get rid of your aff. i.d., so they can order through their own link or just to spite you, they’re going to do it whether it’s “cloaked” or not. In most cases cloaked links are easier to point out than aff links.

I don’t believe I would argue with any aspect of this article. Great job!

I have been thinking about cloaking a ittle and didn’t see a need to do it. However the tracking could be very important.

My stats tracking is awful and I have not yet sat down and seriously worked out how to grow any of my sites based on this. I will be looking forward to your next article.