Link Cloaking and Link Tracking - Are They The Same?

This is a question that comes up all the time. Are link cloaking and link tracking the same? If you want to increase your affiliate profits, which one of these should you use? Lets first talk a little bit about link cloaking and how it works. Link cloaking is a link that is altered in a way that it does not appear to be a big ugly long looking link, or a link that is descried so that it is not obvious that it is an affiliate link. Usually how it works is that there is a list somewhere that looks up the cloaked link and tells the server that the link is to be sent to some place else. When the cloaked link takes a person to your site, it is also capable of logging certain information, such as the date and time the link was clicked on. Where the user is coming from and the IP address of the person that clicked on the link. With this data being collected, it easily allows you to view the information so that you can easily see what links are being clicked on. The process of cloaking the link means that the link data can be tracked. So the answer is, basically, they are the same thing. While a cloaked link will redirect the person that clicked on the link to anywhere you want to take them, the person clicking on the link will see it as a very normal looking link. While in actuality it can be the longest and very ugly looking link in the background. Links like this can many times scare people away from clicking on them. This being said, there is another reason why cloaking a link would be a benefit. If you are emailing out links, there is a fat chance that if the link is very long and very cryptic, no one is going to click on it. They will look at it with a suspicious eye. On the other hand, if you take that long cryptic looking link and give it a nice short description, people will not hesitate to click on it. For those of you who are familiar with links such as “Tiny URL”, there is a down size to using this service. Once you send out that link, you are stuck with it for ever. The magic that goes on, on the back end is on someone else’s server and could go away at any time. On the other hand, if you are in control of those links by using a link cloaking software, you yourself get to maintain those links and they can be changed anytime you want to send visitors to a different place. For example, you may want to change relationships with your affiliate because they are not converting well. In this case, what ever links you have out there on the World Wide Web can be changed to exactly where you want them to go. This as you might imagine is a huge benefit. Ryan King is a link cloaking software expert and has created several tools for internet marketers and web designers. He has written several articles about different software including link cloaking software.