How to Cloak and Track Your Affiliate Links

A raw affiliate link looks like this:

https://www.example.com/product/12345?ref=aff&subid=blog&campaign=q3&tag=yourname-21

It's long, it screams "I get paid for this," it can't be edited once published, and you have no idea how many people clicked it. Link cloaking fixes all four problems at once — and it's not the sketchy practice the name suggests.

What cloaking means (and what it doesn't)

Cloaking an affiliate link just means putting a clean, branded link in front of the messy one. Instead of that monster above, you share yoursite.link/best-chair, which redirects to the affiliate URL.

Worth being precise here, because the word carries baggage: this is not the same as "cloaking" in the black-hat SEO sense, where you show search engines different content than users. Link cloaking shows everyone the exact same destination. The link is tidier, not deceptive.

What it is not is a way to hide that you're using affiliate links. You still have to disclose. More on that below, because getting it wrong is genuinely expensive.

Why bother

You get tracking you otherwise don't have

This is the real reason. Most affiliate dashboards tell you about conversions, eventually, in aggregate. They don't tell you that your chair review drove 400 clicks and your desk review drove 12. Put your own short link in the middle and you see every click, its source, and its device — before the merchant's reporting ever loads.

You can change the destination without editing your content

The product goes out of stock. The merchant kills their affiliate program. Your commission is better elsewhere. With raw links, you're hunting through three years of posts. With cloaked links, you repoint one link and every mention of it updates instantly. Anyone who's had a program shut down on them understands why this alone is worth it.

Links survive being shared

Some platforms strip or block known affiliate parameters. Others just look untrustworthy when they display. A clean branded link travels better.

They look like something a person would click

A 90-character URL with four parameters reads as spam. yoursite.link/best-chair reads as a recommendation.

How to do it

1. Get your raw affiliate link from the merchant's dashboard, with your tracking ID intact. Copy it exactly — a broken tracking ID means unpaid commissions.

1. Create a short link in a tool like Hide.link and paste the affiliate URL as the destination.

1. Give it a readable custom alias that describes the product: /best-chair, not /aff-12345. You'll thank yourself in six months.

1. Use your own custom domain if you have one, so the link carries your brand rather than a generic shortener's.

1. Test it. Click it yourself, follow it through, and confirm the merchant registers the click. Do this every single time — an untested affiliate link is a link that might be earning someone else money.

1. Watch the analytics and prune. Kill what nobody clicks; write more about what they do.

Disclosure: don't skip this

Cloaking a link doesn't remove your obligation to say it's an affiliate link. In the US the FTC requires clear, conspicuous disclosure; other countries have equivalents. A line at the top of the post — "this post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you" — takes ten seconds.

Practically speaking, disclosure barely dents clicks. Readers who trust you don't care. Readers who catch you hiding it never come back.

A few rules that keep you out of trouble

• Check the merchant's terms. A few affiliate programs restrict redirects or cloaking. Rare, but read before you build a system on it.

• One hop only. Don't cloak a link that's already cloaked. Chains are slow and break tracking.

• Keep a naming convention. When you have 200 links, /chair-review-2026 beats /link-88.

• Never let the domain lapse. Every earning link you've ever placed dies with it.

The bottom line

Cloaking your affiliate links takes about a minute per link and gives you three things you can't get otherwise: click data, the ability to change destinations after publishing, and links people actually trust enough to click.

Ready to tidy up? Create a free Hide.link account and cloak your first affiliate link in under a minute.

Related reading: Custom domain short links · URL shortener with analytics