Why you NEED to use OffTo.net to cloak your affiliate links.
April 15, 2009
The other day I made a couple of minor changes to my free affiliate link cloaking service (OffTo.net). I hadn't looked at the site in quite some time, since it was running smooth and I had no reason to "pop the hood", so to speak.
But since I was making a few changes, I decided to take a peak at my web stats to see how it was doing.
To say I was floored is the understatement of the year!
The site has cloaked over 4,500 new links in the last 30 days, and has delivered 9,616,267 raw clicks in the last year and a half. It's averaging 200,000-300,000 unique visitors per month, and has built my email list by more than 4,600 opted-in users.
That's all great, but how does it help you? I'm getting to that part.
You see, more than 20,000 of those visitors each month are coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. At first I was scratching my head about this, asking myself why on earth the site was getting so much love from the search engines (not that I was complaining, mind you!)
So I started taking a look at the keywords the site was ranking for, and it only astounded me even more. Only about 10% of that traffic was coming from keywords relating to the name of the site — people just looking for OffTo.
MOST of the traffic was coming from keywords ranging everywhere from "free tee shirts" to "hypoglycemia diet".
That's when it hit me — the thing about OffTo that should motivate you to use it when cloaking all of your links.
You see, ol' OffTo has racked up a HUGE number of links to its pages (76,259 according to Yahoo! Site Explorer). That massive number of in-bound links has given OffTo a lot of authority in Google's eyes, and so its pages are ranking very well for the
keywords the engines are finding on those pages.
It's the same kind of effect that causes the pages of Wikipedia to rank for so many different keywords. Tons of links means the pages will rank for just about anything.
How does this benefit you?
In case it's not clear yet, this benefits YOU because when you cloak your links using OffTo, your cloaked links will often end up ranking for the keywords on the cloaked page (especially if you choose a link name that has your keywords in it). That means EXTRA traffic from the search engines, for free!
In order to benefit from this extra traffic, you want to be sure the "Hide links to affiliate program on landing page" box is checked when you create the cloaked link, since that's what causes the page to get cached and ranked in the engines.
So the next time you need to use a link cloaker, I strongly recommend you do yourself a favor and get some f.ree traffic by using OffTo.net.
Here's the link:
Comments
79 Responses to “Why you NEED to use OffTo.net to cloak your affiliate links.”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
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Hi Jonathon,
I just tried to visit OFF TO and Trend Micro warned me it was a dangerous site. I just thought you'd like to know.
Sounds like Trend Micro isn't a very reliable piece of software then.
GENIUS!
This is the advantage of trying out new ideas: you never know when you hit gold!
great domain name to hide our affiliate links, I'm going to use it, Thanks for serving.
Thanks for the heads up John, first time I heard about it, tried it and it works great, looks like a good tool for clickbank too. Btw, 20k - 30k visitors a month, good stuff
Terrance Charles
I just heard about this cloaker now and when I saw the site, I thought why in the heck didn't I find out about this sooner!
Thanks Jon!
Johnathan,
Many people have noticed that offto.net will not display "Report Spam" links.
For some reason, the entire website is not displayed.
That vital link on websites (particularly for affilatie links) is not displayed.
Will this be rectified shortly?
When you check the box for "Hide links to affiliate program on landing page" what is being done to help those links rank? What happens if you do not check the box that is different? Are you doing a 301 0r 302 redirect? Thanks!
Jason:
Who are "many people", and what makes you think it won't display those links? It only hides links with the words "affiliate" or "make money". It doesn't touch links that say "report spam".
David:
When you check the box OffTo stores a cached copy of the page in order to hide the affiliate program links on the page. That's why the page ends up ranking.
seem ok to me. No warning message come out. I used kaspersky 2009
Hi Jonathan,
I just visited your site too and had no problem.
Did not even know you had this site going.
Glad I found out about it, I bookmarked it,
and will be using it now.
Thanks a lot!
Jon,
What if you don't want to cloak a link, but instead, you simply wanted to use Offto to link to your blog's home page, and leverage the authority power of Offto?
Would I then have to check that "hide links to affiliate program" box?
Would you get this benefit from any link cloaking service, or are all such services not created equal? For example, I run a script on my site that cloaks some affiliate links for me. What you are saying is that I get the double benefit of backlinks as well?
I've use offto.net since 2007. No problem at all.
An excellent idea and very useful service, Jon.
I'm going to start using this right away.
Can I be confident that it will remain a free service?
Another great tool, Many thanks
Graham
Hi all … I would have thought putting any affiliate links would have been more beneficial to be linked from your own web-page but now you have shared this technique sure makes a marketers life a lot more juiced … thanks Jonathan
All my best to you and your links
Phillip Skinner
Just been to the site.
I hope you can add one more feature which is lacking.
That is to be able to reset the link count to zero. That should be an easy task for you.
Sometimes, we need to re-track again and this feature will be useful! Thanks!
As usual,
Thanks again Jon!
Very interesting Jon.
How come I have never heard of this particular one of your services before?
I have most everything else you have come up with
Keep em coming. Thanks.
Anthony
Keep up the good work Jonathan. Especially your sense of
looking out for what is good for your bloggers and subscribers
and not necessarily because you want to make a quick buck.
I usually find more of quality rather than quantity in your referrals.
Please continue to work hard at this fine approach to deliver the
best to the rest of us. Ofcourse I've picked up my account at
OffTo.net .
Many thanks.
Imran
Hi Jon,
I have just recently started to use cloaked links. I had read on someones post somewhere, about some testing that they had done, which implied that they got slightly higher conversions and longer page vivsits off uncloaked links.
I have yet to prove that myself. I guess if it were true, you would have to see if the extra traffic more than offset a lower conversion rate. My personal inclination is to cloak my links, so I will be using this service.
Thanks for the heads up.
Peter
Great Post….
Thanks for sharing and i have come to know about this first time.
Absolutely nice to get quality traffic for free of cost.
Best regards,
Hashe
Wow sounds good. I will try to use your link cloaker service. Thanks Joh
Hi Jon
This post just came at the right time. Just today, I was wondering how to disguise my affiliate links. While doing some research, I read in many articles that search engines penalize cloaking. I would like to use this tool since one of your software has helped me but I want to be careful.
Is Offto search engine friendly?
Thanks.
Wow! I never thought of that technique to get incoming links! All without any ppc advertising, seo ranking etc!
However Jonathan I dont understand 2 things.
1. How do you actually earn money from this service?
2. Thousands of pages are indexed by Google when all cloaked links are nofollow links.
Thanks
Demis
Hi Jon,
You just keep the hits coming!
Link cloaking while increasing the chance of Google love is huge for anybody needing more authority for their site or offer.
I think that pretty much covers anybody looking to gain visitors, readers or customers.
Good job!
Jeff
I used to use Offto quite regularly but like your first commenter i was getting a warning message from my firewall (Virgin's PC Guard) I easily changed this, but my thoughts were, if i get this warning then you can bet your bottom dollar that whole lot of other people will get the same message. So because of this I decided to start using redirect scripts on my own server.
With this option i can always include my blog URL in the string along with a reccomends message. It seems that your Offto URL has a few issues with firewalls which in turn can affect your earning potential. As for search engine benefits, isn't it better for your SEO if you have your own URL along with your product, just my thoughts.
Thanks for the read
Seems you are missing an opportunity with the domain http://offto.info/ which is just sat there just now doing nothing! Surely it would be worth adding something to the page that could earn you a few $ for a few minutes work
Sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees and though I hate stating the obvious sometimes even the brightest amongst us misses the most obvious - so the question is - am I missing something here? LOL
Wow John!
This is the kind of tip that I haven't read anywhere!! That's why i love reading your blog . I'm always searching for things that will make my life easier and never thought of this- and would never think of this if I weren't reading your blog.
Thanks so much for this invaluable information.
All the best,
Eren
I'm off to try this out. Johnathan you have certainly been a huge help in getting traffic to my online store. Keep up the great work!!
I see ads for link cloakers all time stating that no one wants to click on affiliate links so you will make more sales if you cloak your affiliate links. Every time I see a Tinyurl, ezurl, usfreeze, Offto, or any other shorten Url I know it's an affiliate Url and most of the
time it is associated with Spam or is within a spam letter advertising some program.
I try to report the spamming to the program and because it is a shorten Url without an affiliate code included, the program owners say they can't do anything since they have no way knowing which affiliate sent the spam.
It seems shorten Urls is just another way to allow Spammers to get away with spam.
Some Url shorting programs has a way to report the Url being used as spam and they will terminate the Url and some says they will terminate Urls used for spam but they don't furnish a way for reporting spam. I think offto is one of the latter sites.
I never use a shorten Url. If you have a domain name why use a shorten Url when you can cloak your affiliate links and build recognition to your own domain name.
This probably isn’t the kind of feedback you wanted but I hate spam so much I will fight it anyway and anytime I can.
Delton
It seems shorten Urls is just another way to allow Spammers to get away with spam.
I completely disagree with this. It's just as easy (or difficult) to determine who a spammer is through a cloaked link as it is through a regular affiliate link.
I take spam reports seriously, and have a zero tolerance policy. One report of spam with the email (and headers) as proof and the url is banned.
Seems you are missing an opportunity with the domain http://offto.info/
And what opportunity would that be? The .info domain was the forum, but I closed it down due to lack of interest. If you have a great idea of how to monetize the site, please, do tell.
isn't it better for your SEO if you have your own URL along with your product?
That really depends on how much authority your site has. People love to post articles to EzineArticles.com that link to their own site because EZA pages rank so well due to the site's authority.
OffTo is similar. If it's a cached page, it's easier to get ranked for your keywords than to try and rank your own url (unless your site has a lot of authority, too).
I've heard about OffTo in different conversations, but I have never used it.
Looks like I'll be using a new cloaker from now on!
Allen Graves
Great Post. Very useful info…
Jonathan,
I tried OffTo when you first launched it, but never made much use of it for whatever reason - we use redirects on our site now.
However, we recently heard that Google doesn't like affiliate links, and that includes some of the URL shortening services which it apparently now "knows" are really affiliate links in disguise, and therefore won't rank sites that contain affiliate links as well as ones that don't.
Are you in a position to confirm or deny this, and if it is true, how likely is it that OffTo will also suffer this fate?
Thanks,
Mark
Thanks for sharing OffTo with us, I use four of your services and did not even know OffTo existed!
I had to read your post twice before the penny dropped, I will be making use of this great free redirect service very soon!
Have you a full list of all your web services? -I would love to konw I am not missing out!
Thanks, Dave.
Are you in a position to confirm or deny this, and if it is true, how likely is it that OffTo will also suffer this fate?
Yes, I am in a position to deny it, as OffTo is doing better than ever in Google and has been around since 2007.
LOL.. I didn't even know you had that site and I am glad that you explained how to benefit from using it (I'm using other tactics for cloaking) because otherwise I wouldn't have thought of the authority benefit aspect.
/Mikael
Looks great and I tried to register twice - but each time it didn't send out the required confirmation email. And yes, I did look in my junk folder. Any ideas?
I checked out off.to a while ago and added to my list of things to look into and never realy got back to it. I will definatly be checking it out again now.
Hmm interesting, I am just using redirects at this moment and they're working well. Do you have any stats or so that say how much visitors are lost to signing up for the affiliate program themselves and buying through their own link?
I guess it would be radically different depending on who your market is. If it is a savvy internet marketing dude then higher % compared to someone looking for knitting advice
Thanks, it's a great service.
I added some url and signed up after I've done this.
Now all my short urls - with good keyword - are not in my account and don't get free clicks for them.
Is there a possibility to insert them into my account?
Jon,
It used to stop "Report Spam" links from showing.
I have not used the service for some time for that reason. Perhaps there have been some minor changes since then.
I used to enjoy using the service until a Site Owner reported it to Me and I noticed it Myself on that Site and on others.
I NOW notice that the "Report Spam" link does show on websites, but I know it did not previously.
I stopped using the service and so did a friend of mine who noticed the same thing.
HOWEVER, since this has been overcome, I may start using the service again.
I wanted to thank you for providing it.
Thanks so much for telling your list about this yesterday! I've been on your list for about a year but I didn't know about this service.
Yesterday morning I was #92 for "portrait photography chicago" and after posting on offto.net yesterday afternoon, I'm now #28!
Great post, very useful info.
Thanks Jonathan for this seo friendly affiliate cloaker service. Its urls act like hubpages or squidoo lens and seems liked by search engines especially google. So it gives the users a second chance to get traffic and not only hide their links. thanks again Jonathan…
Wow
Link cloaking and a high pr link in one. Thanks
Rick
Hi Jon, I signed up for OffTo.net and it's awesome! You did a great job with it and it's probably the most unique link cloaker service out there. Also, I got some really targeted visitors from the site.
Totally cool, man. I use half a dozen of your services on a daily basis and they're all a really big part of my business foundation!
Keep it up!
Cheers,
Josip Barbaric
Excellent cloaking indeed!! And certainly makes sense to use if it can result in more traffic to one’s site. As for the “Browse links” – could there be a search function added so that one could search and find links by keywords? Also, as for the “Promote” – could there be a way to have people go to landing pages grouping links by keywords? It would more likely inspire visitor to click the link if he knew he would be taken to a landing page with links in a category of a specific interest with an option to cloak his links and open the free account.
Thanks for sharing! Great post.
I will try your OffTo.net, thanks.
Jonathan kudos on the OFFto services. I am already using the the 3WayLinks products and have been a regular reader of your Blog. Nothing I have ever come across in your Blogs gave me the impression that you would suggest any blackhat or shortcut approach. To the contrary your advice is always aimed at protecting bloggers and website owners to get the full benefit from their sweat equity. OFFto Link Cloaking addresses a problem we all know exists and robs too many from reaping the benefit of their hard earned work.
That in itself is already a great advantage. It is best to reserve judgement on the traffic and rank benefit gained from OFFto till we have it running a sufficiently long period of time. I trust that Jonathan as meticulous tester has done his homework before he made his claim. So let us give him the benefit of the doubt till we have proof to the contrary.
I like offto, explained why on my blog at
http://offto.net/offtopost/
It is also perfect to use it on twitter . I like to use offto in logged in mode, easy to see my stats
More tips on my tweet
David Norden
Dude. Seriously. Freakin' awesome tip. You ROCK.
…jp
When the word cloaking appeared I instantly thought of all the time I spent playing with S.E.C. and Jellybeans from the old days. I wonder if Peter Bray and GDog are still selling their wares. Anyway I'll try your link cloaker and thanks for the post.
Hey, thanks for the tip! I'm gonna start using this to cloak all my links asap.
What are your thoughts on this article: {snip: no urls in the post please}, particularly this sentence: "The main reason for my reluctance to use Offto.net is the apparent blocking by popular firewalls that flag Offto.net as a possible phishing or spam site."
Are we truly losing a lot of possible sales due to that? I saw someone post here that TrendMicro was blocking it too and so I wonder how many others show the linked sites as a problem site and so they just move on?
Acne:
I am currently working to have that red flag removed. I take SPAM and phishing VERY seriously, and remove all malicious/spam links from OffTo.net as soon as they are reported.
I seriously doubt it has any real impact on sales, though, because so far a tiny fraction of people (namely 2) have reported it popping up on their machine — out of more than 8,000 people who have read this post.
All the same, I'm working to have that flag removed, since it's bogus.
Thanks, Jonathan. That's great news as I've already implemented quite a few Offto links. :)) Now I can implement more and do so confidently.
Looks like it's a win-win situation for anybody who uses your free service. You've done so many different ventures and they all come out successful. It's just incredible!
The only affiliate program I use is Amazon, but because of that interesting benefit, I will consider using your program.
The most likely reason that trend micro is flagging your domain is this:
Some people are using your service to promote spammy/shady pages or spyware. Since you link or redirect to this page you are flagged.
So if you want to prevent this from happening, you should do alot more moderation on the site and not just "let it run". Perhaps this could be done automatically in some way.
Offto.net works great. I've been using it for the longest time. Although I do feel a little funny when I'm tricking people into clicking on my affiliate links…
Yes, I've been using OffTo.net and the results are hard to ignore.
It's great tools for cloak and getting traffic for free. Good serve jon.. thanks so much.
I'll have to check out Offto. THat's an amazing amount of traffic!
Why should I cloak my links? Doesn't Google's Webmaster Guidelines advise against cloaking? Or, are they referring to a different kind of cloaking? Should I be cloaking all links, or only the affiliate links?
Sorry, I know these may seem like dumb questions, but I'm new to the game, and I honestly don't know the answers. Any clarification would be much appreciated.
hi jon,
i've been using offto.net for over a year already. i love it.
just 1 quick question.
the url (nickname) , does it give any impact on the seo if i put keywords in there instead if leaving it blank?
Heh, using offto.net really has paid off, didn't think it would. Thanks.
Jonathan that sounds like a great service. I use my own script for affiliate links, but I could see how using your service would be even better. Thanks for the heads up.
It sounds good. You make a good points there. Gonna check for the OffTo.net
I'll have to check out Offto. THat's an amazing amount of traffic!
Great tip, my traffic has gone out the roof since I've started cloaking my links.
Offto has been down for some time…is this service still available?
Well, from the looks of it, this is THE tool!!
I'm afraid I don't get it just yet, though. What's the need for cloaking affiliate links?
An excellent resource of information i will certainly return to check on the latest posts
It is very interesting post and very informative as well. I was not aware of this thing thanx a lot for sharing this here. Thanx a lot for sharing this post with us.
I have used and loved your service for a long time. But I notice that for the past few days, it's been down. What's happened? Is it still available?