Revealing the Importance of Cookies when Cloaking Links
Have you ever wondered why your affiliate links look so strange? Why is it that instead of just sending your potential customers to http://www.productname.com, you actually end up sending them to http://www.productname.com/?hop=43092 or something like that? Many beginners don't come to terms with the true meaning behind affiliate links for quite some time, but understanding it is the key to understanding a lot of the aspects of cloaking affiliate links.
In a nutshell, the idea behind affiliate links centers on something known as 'cookies'. These aren't the crumbly biscuits that you eat, but rather the digital variety that are left on your computer after you visit certain websites. Essentially, when you visit a website it sometimes records certain information, and that information is known as a cookie and it is left on your hard disk even after you close the browser window.
When it comes to affiliate links, the information recorded is the fact that the potential customer in question visited that particular website through your affiliate link. As such, if that potential customer were to make a purchase while that cookie containing the recorded information is still on the hard disk, you would be credited for that purchase and paid the commission that you're owed.
Due to this it is important that you realize that the actual website itself isn't really all that critical - it is the cookie that controls whether or not you receive the commissions that you're entitled to! So whether or not your potential customer visits the website for 5 seconds or 5 minutes is completely irrelevant - so long as they have been there for even the smallest fraction of a second, they would have the cookie information recorded already.
Now that you know how cookies work, you should see how they tie into cloaking links. Very often, cloaked links involve double redirects, whereby the browser is ordered to visit the affiliate link for a split second, before automatically redirecting to another URL. As such, it is able to acquire the cookie and then proceed on to a non-affiliate link URL.
As you can probably see, this is the foundation that lies behind many cloaked links. By enabling the acquisition of that all-important 'cookie' before moving the potential customer on to a different website, it is possible to cloak links fairly effectively. That being said, there are still intricacies involving the actual coding of these cloaked links that also need to be taken care of - but so long as cookies are present, you will be able to get the commissions that you desire!
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