On April 27th, Clickbank announced that their new HopLink Shield links were fully operational.
HopLink Shield is a free tool on the Clickbank website that encrypts the affiliate and vendor nicknames in HopLinks. It is supposed to add another layer of privacy / anonymity to help keep affiliates promotional efforts and techniques hidden.
It doesn’t quite work that way, however.
As shown in the sceenshot below, to encode your HopLinks your hoplinks, you enter your affiliate nickname and the vendor nickname below then hit the “Encode” button (or you can get the same type of links encoded directly through the Clickbank Marketplace without going to the Encoder).
You then end up with a hoplink that looks like this:
http://e3f88il-ze5dou56-ib8trcsef.hop.clickbank.net/
Now, if you go to https://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_encoding.htm you’ll see the “Decoder” on the right side of the page, so the new links don’t exactly hide anything.
So, don’t give up on your redirects just yet.
About Rosalind Gardner
So this is what, fair play for the affiliate and the unethical alike? lol
hmmm, how ‘un’ useful. not sure about the new color scheme either!
:-0
Jerry
Thanks for this info. I personally prefer the redirect links. I like to buy my domain names from Godaddy.com You can purchase a .info domain for .99, as opposed to having to pay for a .com domain name for $9.99 In the end, if you’re only purchasing the domain name for redirect purposes, it doesn’t matter if you purchase a .info domain and you’ll be saving tons of money. Redirect is the way to go.
Roz, I’ve been using cloaked links and I use the free service at http://offto.net/
What are the advantages and disadvantages of cloaked links and redirects?
Cheers
Dan
With the decoder available it doesn’t really worth anything, does it? What’s the purpose then?
I mean, everyone in the affiliate business will know how to decode.. so, who is this encoding for? The regular buyers? Why would they want to see your vendor / affiliate ids?
Hi Alex,
Exactly my point. I don’t get it either.
Cheers,
Ros
When you say ‘redirects’ is that what a cloaking program does? I’m trying to understand the definition.
Websites like budurl.com and tinyurl.com are free sites that you can get addresses from… these addresses automatically redirect to your hoplink.
Hi Michael,
You’re absolutely correct. However, I don’t like to think how bad it would be if my affiliates sites were loaded with those and they all of a sudden went down….
Cheers,
Ros
Curiosity brought me to the comments section.
Curiosity compelled me to follow Dan’s link above to “offo.net”.
Norton warned me that this was a “known fraudulent page.”
I offer this “heads-up” for other readers who may not have Norton installed on their computers.
I strongly believe that your link redirects should reside on your *own* website. In the event that the link redirection site goes down or out of business or whatever, and you’ve already spent a great deal of time promoting that link, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential affiliate revenue. That said, I always make sure to install my affiliate link redirect plugin on my site as soon as I get it up and running. (I say plugin because I’ve just finished converting all my sites over to WordPress.)
Thanks for the clarification – I get it, and I’ll be keeping any redirects ‘in house’.
Not to mention that by using “clickbank.net” some programs won’t allow you to click the link.