Cloaking with frames is fraught with problems nowadays and is actually likely to lose you more commissions than it saves. Why? Well, in short, the biggest browser, the horrible IE, on its standard settings, will block any cookie that originates from a domain other than that shown in the browser address bar. As your cookie is going to be set from the frame in the header of the affiliate site, you’re screwed every time.

As the majority of internet users still use IE and will never touch the standard privacy settings you are shooting yourself in the foot. You have to test all redirects in different browsers but most people don’t and as a result use techniques like this and wonder why sales are so poor. Bob, it will work just fine in Firefox as you have doubtless seen for yourself, but I’m sure you don’t only want to sell to people using that browser. Frame redirects worked well once, but I would never recommend it nowadays.

I’ve written at length about cloaking and redirects at my blog if anyone wants more information and explanations – there is a lot of information you probably won’t read anywhere else about link cloaking. Just search for link cloaking and you’ll find all the posts I’ve made about the subject. Hopefully it will help some folks and they will probably learn some things they never knew.

I like the idea… but as I am just starting out and I do not have any affiliates at this point, I am not sure if this is plausible for me in the near future. Thanks.

It might take a while, but I’ll keep an eye on it and report back if I do notice any organic traffic converting into sales.

Kudos for a great SEO article – Trackback from SEOKudos…