Time to update your affiliate links
Text Link Ads is sending emails that they have changed their URL structure and all the affiliates had to change to the new URl, they are suing tiny URL. I guess this move is because of the Google’s move on penalizing sites selling text links.
Whatever may be the reason, if you have posted these links inside some posts its going to be pain to update all those links, because TLA says in one week the old links become inactive.
To avoid this in future and also to hide your affiliate links from Google use redirects for all the affiliate links, this way they don’t look annoying like tinyurl links and you just have to update one link in future if something like this happens. Personally i don’t like tinyurl links and i never click those links because you never know where they will take you.
Here i will show you how can you setup redirects of affiliate links.
1. Using .htaccess
Using .htaccess file you can set redirects quite easily if you are on a linux hosting and using apache server.
For exaple you are going to add a redirect to Text Link Ads referral link, add the below line to your .htaccess
Redirect /tla http://tinyurl.com/3e2xbo
Now replace all your TLA referral links with http://www.yoursite.com/tla
What the above code does is whenever some one clicks on the link http://www.yoursite.com/tla it redirects to the url http://tinyurl.com/3e2xbo.
2. Using rederects in webpages
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<title>Text Link Ads</title>
<script>window.location="http://tinyurl.com/3e2xbo";</script>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2; url=http://tinyurl.com/3e2xbo">
</head>
<body>
<p align="center">If the page doesn't reload automatically
Please <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3e2xbo">click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
So your visitors will never see the ugly tinyurl link. Don’t forget to replace all my links to yours if you use this code.
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3 Responses to “Time to update your affiliate links”
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August 25th, 2007 10:48 am
August 25th, 2007 5:56 pm
Yah it is better to hide those links
August 29th, 2007 2:27 pm
I use a header redirect system, I create a php file for each link I want to hide with the following:
Start php
header(’location:http://affiliatelink.com?id=123′)
end php
then link to that file in your blog post (or where ever) rather than linking direct to the affiliate link
i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/links/tradedoubler.php
Not sure how this differs from HTTP redirects or which is best but it seems to work