Is Affiliate Link Cloaking Okay with Google?

If you’ve seen summaries (like this one, for example) of Matt Cutts’ yesterday’s video on cloaking, you may have read that cloaking is always in violation of Google’s quality guidelines and there is “no such thing as white hat cloaking”. Yes, he actually did say that no “white hat cloaking” exists, but there was something else — hugely important for honest affiliates — that the legendary head of Google’s Webspam team said in that video. To begin with, here’s how he defined “cloaking”:

So, first off, what is cloaking? Cloaking is essentially showing different content to users than to Googlebot…

Secondly, in conclusion of the video, he summarized:

…basically, ask yourself: “Do I have special code that looks exactly for the user agent Googebot, or the exact IP address of Googlebot, and treat it differently somehow. If treat it just like everybody else — so you’d send it based on geolocation, you look at the end agent phones — that sort of thing is fine. It’s just that [when] you’re looking for Googlebot specifically, and you’re doing something different that’s where you start to get into a high risk area.

Based on the above, it all boils down to the intent of the cloaking. Are you trying to trick Google into believing something about your webpage that it’s really not? If you are, you’re asking for trouble… If you aren’t, and cloaking your affiliate links to make them more manageable (and/or secure) — as discussed in my Affiliate Link Cloaking post back in May 2009 — you should be okay.

EDIT (of 3:50 pm): Furthermore, it is apparent — both from the video, and from this tweet by Matt — that “cloaking” is really not the best word to describe what affiliates are predominantly doing. Call it URL “masking”, “shortening”, “disguising”, anything else, but not “cloaking”.

Full Matt Cutts’ video on Google’s stance regarding cloaking may be seen below:

5 thoughts on “Is Affiliate Link Cloaking Okay with Google?”

  1. “Cloaking” in SEO terms is not “cloaking” in affiliate marketing terms.

    As a black hat SEO, I might serve a page to Googlebot that shows legit content, no ads, and is updated frequently. To a user directed from Google, I could show a giant flashy banner to sell my product – or worse, redirect them to a different site entirely, containing who knows what.

    As an affiliate, cloaking means to obfuscate the destination of the URL from all parties – or at least, to clean up the URL. Technically, I would consider a link shortened by bit.ly to be “cloaked” – certainly Google doesn’t have an issue with that.

  2. Great post, Geno. I add Eclipse Link Cloaker to all my sites in January and saw the sales plummet. Recently, one of my affiliate managers notice the lack of sales and questioned what had happened. We tracked the decline back to the date of the link cloaking. Eclipse says this is impossible. Their software is made for Affiliate Linking and no one has ever complained. Do you or any of your readers have any experience with this WordPress plugin? I’d sure like to get to the bottom of this.

    Laurie Cohen

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