Is it necessary to hide affiliate links?

Is it necessary to hide affiliate links? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Is it necessary to hide affiliate links? error on your web browser. Problem :

I currently include affiliate links on my pages. The links go to PHP files that in turn redirect to the affiliate pages using the following header code:

<?php header('Location: http://www.affiliate-site.com/track/12345678/'); ?>

When the page visitor clicks on the link they get redirected to the affiliate page with the tracking code in the title bar.

• Is there any risk of someone abusing my tracking number or ill purposes?


• Is it possible/ recommended that I hide the tracking number from being displayed?


• Should I dissallow robots from indexing my redirect PHP files?

I am concerned about stats and clicks tampering and getting banned for inappropriate usage of my affiliate tracking code.

Solution :

Practice of redirecting to your own page has been started long time for 2 main reasons:

1. Adding link click counter in your own PHP code so you can track how many people clicked on the link


2. Preventing your domain from having too many outbound links

If your website has too many outbound links directly on the page it may affect your SEO although Google algorithm is much better than 10 years ago and if you have 1 link per article or so I don't think it will have any negative impact.

There is also psychological factor and not many people speak about it, a visitor of the page seeing ?ref=122345, if he knows it's am affiliate link he may suspect that your article is not genuine and that you are doing this only for money. For that reason people preferred to hide the fact that article is sponsored or that they have any advantage of recommending a product or service.

There is nothing bad an attacker could do if he saw your affiliate link.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the redirects, affiliate, error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!