Cloaking your URL is important for the success of your affiliate marketing endeavours because it makes your link more user-friendly, simple, and memorable. Failing to cloak your links can make them appear suspicious and potentially harmful to visitors, which can negatively impact your affiliate program. That’s why you’re going to need good cloaking services. Here, we compiled a top-list of cloaking services most suitable for affiliate marketing!
What is Cloaking in Affiliate Marketing?
With strict moderation and identity verification where you need to provide dozens of documents, even income certificates, some platforms can give affiliate marketers a really hard time in 2024. When it comes to promoting weight loss offers, casinos, dating sites, or slot machines, you can get banned by Facebook, Google and other platforms.
To avoid such situations, cloaking tools can come in handy. They simply prevent anti-fraud systems from detecting the real landing page. Imagine that you have several web pages with different content. While bots and moderators can only see the ‘white’ page, potential clients are redirected to the real landing page where the offer or product is displayed.
Using cloaking tools can be considered to be a traffic source mislead. However, getting promo materials that are not approved by Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms through moderation process becomes a lot easier.
Now cloaking tools are extremely popular among almost affiliate marketers working with ‘gray-hat’ and ‘black-hat’ offers. For example, despite being highly negative towards gambling, Facebook is full of millions of gambling offers. Once a fake advertising campaign is launched, only a fake landing page is visible to bots, while users see a real ad inviting them to win easy money in a casino.
Filtering out unwanted traffic is another way of using cloaking. For instance, users from Tier-3 countries, bots, or competitor scripts — all of which eat up advertising budgets without providing any returns. You can create several copies of pages leaving the real advertising product visible only to those users that have the parameters you specify (GEO, device, IP address, etc).
There are many other purposes of cloaking tools like protecting valuable promo materials and profitable combinations from theft, identifying client IPs or defending against spy services. It used to be a popular tool for SEO specialists. They would show search engine bots doorway pages filled with a lot of keyword queries, while presenting a sales or informational article to blog readers. Today, this method no longer works, as search algorithms have learned to distinguish between content and unnatural keyword stuffing. As a result, cloaking in SEO can lead to lower rankings or a complete ban of the website.
How does Cloaking Work?
Cloaking is based on software scripts and data verification. Upon receiving a request, a web server identifies whether it is a bot, a moderator, or an ordinary user by checking the user-agent information or IP address parameters. The server then shows each visitor the appropriate page: compliant content for the bots and moderators, or the desired advertising product for regular users.
When you try to identify a website request via user agent information, there is a script launched with a filtered database. If the information is found in the database, the page content is altered; regular visitors, however, see the real page content. The downside of this technology is that bots constantly change their names to bypass cloaking. The user-agent method is also ineffective against moderators, as they often access sites pretending to be regular visitors.
A more advanced approach is the IP-based identification. In this case, the web server compares users based on their IP address. Even if a bot or moderator changes their name, they can still be identified by their IP address. However, with the advent of anti-detect browsers and proxies, it’s relatively easy to hide one’s fingerprint. The question is whether anti-fraud systems will incur additional costs to perform checks, as good tools come with a high price. Therefore, for now, cloaking still works effectively.
Types of Cloaking
There are several types of cloaking techniques. For example, search engines, marketplaces, social networks, and online stores also filter users into different categories based on GEO and interests. In this case, they are not violating any rules. However, this is still considered cloaking. Let’s take a closer look.
‘White Hat’ Cloaking Techniques
As we mentioned earlier, it refers to putting users into different categories based on various parameters. This method helps to filter out fraudulent traffic — clicks that do not result in conversions. In ‘white hat’ cloaking, everyone sees the same content, without exception, so there are no deceiving practices involved.
‘Gray Hat’ Cloaking Techniques
‘Gray Hat’ cloaking does not violate the law, except for the policies of certain platforms. For example, showing dissimilar pages to bots and visitors is not illegal. However, this does not comply with search engine guidelines, so such websites are banned.
In affiliate marketing, ‘gray hat’ cloaking helps promo materials to pass moderation more quickly when you promote weight loss products, dietary supplements, and dating sites. The biggest traffic sources set their own rules, and cloaking becomes necessary — otherwise, the moderation process could take weeks, wasting the entire budget. The same applies to betting and gambling. While these verticals may be legal in some countries or regions, Facebook and Google still restrict their promotion. Cloaking can help to bypass these restrictions and profit from ‘high-value’ offers.
‘Black Hat’ Cloaking Techniques
‘Black Hat’ cloaking is used to promote something that is actually illegal. For example, the advertising of pornography and online casinos is banned in some countries. An affiliate marketer, anticipating a large profit, takes the risk — grabbing offers, applying cloaking, receiving traffic, and making money. However, this is all done by deceiving AI, moderators, and visitors. This type of cloaking is also used for hiding the traffic source prohibited by affiliate networks — such as from 18+ sites or branded sources.
