How to Hide your Affiliate Links Using .htaccess

February 13, 2009 by Breakaway
Filed under: Make Money Online

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In the last post, we talked about how to use a PHP redirect and an HTML redirect in order to hide your affiliate links. Those are some fantastic ways to go about it, but they also have some downfalls.

Here is another way you can hide your affiliate links:

Using a .htaccess 301 Redirect

**BEWARE** Don’t go messing around in your .htaccess file. Just do what you need to do, save, and upload.

First, go through your FTP and find your .htaccess file. (If you don’t have one, you may need to create one. Fantastico WordPress installs will always have one.)

Download it and open it up using Notepad.

You may see some code and markup you are unfamiliar with. Just go to the blank lines underneath it, hit enter a few times, and begin with the following code.

A 301 redirect tells the search engines that the page has moved, and to find it’s new address at the place you link to. It’s like snail mail forwarding or e-mail forwarding.

On a blank line on the .htaccess file, type the following:

redirect 301

That’s what we will use to start the redirect.

Next, think of a fake page name for what you want the redirect to be. For this example we’ll link to Niche Titans. So, we’ll make up a fake page name called: niche-titans.php So, add: /niche-titans.php to the redirect. It should look like this:

redirect 301 /niche-titans.php

You DO NOT need to have a /niche-titans.php file on your server for this to work.

Lastly we will add the site we are linking to (your affiliate link).

redirect 301 /niche-titans.php http://nichetitans.com

Now, save and upload the file back to your server.

Now, if you create a link to: http://your-website.com/niche-titans.php it will automatically direct anyone who clicks on the link to http://nichetitans.com … Easy, huh?

This will give you control over the link people see in the status bar, and yet another way to hide your affiliate links for your niche sites.

Hope this helps!

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