Welcome to the Joomla SEO Club and Book

What it Does

The "Simply Links Cloaker" allows you to link one word on your site to an affiliate offer, no matter where it appears and it will automatically cloak the link. It offers two main benefits:

• The ability to set links sitewide makes updating your links much, much easier.
• Cloaking is a useful and commonly used method to avoid other people taking commissions generated by your hard work.
  

Combining Two Extensions

1. Simply Links. Allows you to link one keyword to a URL everywhere on a site. For example, sh404SEF links to our review of it, no matter where its written on the site.
2. Affiliate Link Cloaker. A plugin that hides your affiliate links, although the cloaking has to be manually added to each link.
   

Possible Issues

Please post any extra bugs you find and we'll continue to make this better.

One potential problem: It removes links if the word appears in h1, h2, h3 or h4 tags, but a couple of people have reported problems if the heading runs to two lines.

If this is a problem for you, remove the clearly-marked hack betweenn lines 204 to 215 in simplylinks.php.

Click here to download the Simply Links Cloaker. (registration required)

Comments (13)

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any tutorial on it?
written by faizan, November 15, 2007

@alledia : do you have any tutorial for this extension?

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written by Steve Burge, November 15, 2007

Hi Faizan

Not yet. It should be relatively simple.

Upload the component and the mambot uploads automatically. Add the words and links into the component.

If people do find it tricky, I'll write up a tutorial.

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written by Good Web Practices, November 16, 2007

Steve, I'm a bit unclear, I'm not sure if I really have understood what this hack does. What do you mean it will automatically cloak the link? I understand that it hides the link URL in the title bar, but I don't see the how it makes you avoid other people taking commissions generated by your hard work???

Would this extension stop me posting comments saying, for example: I recommend WebCEO (and making it WEBCEO a URL with my own reference code http://www.webceo.com/refenceabc?)

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written by Good Web Practices, November 16, 2007

Steve, thinking about this extension, is it not bad for SEO purposes as it takes away the SEO advantages gained from Simply Links? Take for example when I type sh404SEF, instead of the link being a simple:

sh404SEF

It is now:

sh404SEF

Is this hyperlink SEO friendly???

I see the Simply Link extension as good not only for encouraging users to click on pages within your site or affiliate sites, but also for seach engines to link the keyword with your page. Say for example the fact that your page sh404SEF is linked probably 100 times from within your site to the page: http://www.alledia.com/blog/jo...extension/ I think will communicate to Google that, that page is about sh404SEF.

My question is, is this extension giving URLs which are as SEO friendly? Will all this within the link, take anything from the value of the link in terms search engines:

onmouseout="window.status='';return true;" onmouseover="window.status='';return true;" and class="simply_intern"

?

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written by Zorro, November 19, 2007

David,

from what I know, searcb engines don't follow or index javascript URLs. So, while the "Simply Links" part looks very useful, that advantage probably disappears again if you obfuscate the URL by means of the cloaking javascript.

I might be totally wrong though. Steve, can you share some insight on this?

Kind regards,
Zorro

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written by Steve Burge, November 19, 2007

Hi Guys

David - you're right. This isn't useful for people who want to run a site with Wikipedia style internal links, passing Page Rank between their pages.

The only real use for this is on affiliate sites. There the links look like this: http://danyg.derivadverts.com/rhr823442hrr2224324

We don't need to pass any PR to these pages and in fact, we don't want to. Zorro's point about Javascript is correcct and its useful for pure affiliate sites.

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written by Good Web Practices, November 20, 2007

OK thanks for clearing that up Steve. Incidentally, the link you posted seems to be broken.

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written by Tom, November 29, 2007

I've been using your site for a long time now, I have to admit that I really don't like this feature as it gives a bad user experience. I always like to look at the url I'm going to in the bar at the bottom of the browser, it just doesn't feel right if nothing shows for a link!

One way to get around this would be to modify the cloaker so that instead of not showing anything, it shows the un-affiliated link (this would have to be done via a parameter when you create the link in content). This way you get the affiliate commissions, but it's almost totally transparent to the user.

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written by Steve Burge, November 29, 2007

Hi Tom

Thanks for the feedback. Its an interesting question.

We designed this software for use with sites that run very common affiliate links such as Amazon and Ebay. For those programs, lots of computers have spyware that can rewrite those links and add their own tracking code. Cloaking is a vital tactic.

However, you're right - it may well be overkill on Alledia where the programs are not common and their links are relatively transparent (http://www.compassdesigns.net/...es/527.htm), certainly compared with major companies who often use URLs like this: http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2396044-10450354

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written by Ilan Hertz, March 26, 2008

I installed the component but I see it doesn't link all the times the word/phrase appears whithin the content. Is there a way to link it every time the word/phrase appears?

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written by Ilan Hertz, March 26, 2008

I figured it myself.. sorry for bugging you

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written by Steve Burge, March 26, 2008

You're welcome - its in the mambot for those who are wondering.

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written by Space Zone, July 24, 2008

will it be same as it for Jom. 1.5?

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