So, can a cloaked affiliate link get top 10 Google rankings? Yes, apparently it still works if the keyword has very little competition, and the amount of inbound links to the cloaked link is of good quality.
As you can see in the screenshot above, an affiliate for LinkTrackr, none other than the great Mr. John Chow, got his cloaked link ranked #4 for the term “linktrackr”. The URL is actually a custom domain used with his LinkTrackr account. There’s no real content in that URL, except the actual LinkTrackr website cloaked in an iframe.
This means, people searching for LinkTrackr can actually visit the cloaked affiliate link, and Mr. Chow would be earning some pretty easy money. No advertising involved, no money spent.
How to Create a Cloaked Affiliate Link with LinkTrackr
Although there’s no guarantee that your cloaked affiliate link will rank in Google, here’s how you can optimize it in your LinkTrackr account.
First, you need to enter your own title, keywords and description. If you are duplicating LinkTrackr’s own meta information, ranking higher than LinkTrackr is unlikely. It’s also possible that your cloaked link will not be indexed at all due to duplicate content.
Next, make sure you allow the cloaked affiliate link to be indexed by search engines. This means you will allow Google’s bots and spiders to treat your cloaked link like an actual unique page or website.
Ranking Your Cloaked Affiliate Link
Of course, the hardest part will be to get enough inbound links to your cloaked affiliate link. In the case of John Chow, his high ranking blog makes it easy. He just needed to put the link in one or to pages in his blog. So he did not optimize the title.
However, if the keywords you target are not competitive – for example long tail keywords – then you might just get ranked on page one of Google with a handful of links to your cloaked affiliate link. This technique also works with basic domain name cloaking.
And what’s better than free traffic from Google?
