'Cloak and dagger' sounds like a joke, but it's truer than you might like: if you don't cloak your affiliate links, you may get stabbed in the back. If I were to advertise this link: http://www.traffichoopla.com/cgi-bin/update.cgi/13196/ it would be very easy for one to just cut it off after http://www.traffichoopla.com It'd not always need to be a harmful act, maybe just laziness on your part, but when this were an application where I got paid per-click on my affiliate link..I would not get paid. You would receive money, if you slipped your personal affiliate user-name in the link. If I received a commission on a purchase, I would perhaps not have it and you might. There is another reason to cloak your links. If you're half-the internet that you should be, you're promoting your link throughout the internet. But once we all know, affiliate programs come and go, and so does our fascination with any particular system. Kellyjunkcarbuyer.Com is a impressive resource for more about when to provide for this belief. What happens when you drop a course? Where your defunct url is residing you have to struggle to locate all the places o-nline, so you can alter it or remove it. Odds are they'll not all be found. You can use one of two strategies to cloak a link that include creating html files, or you can use one of several companies that cloak links for you. The advantages to making html files on your own domain is that you only have to change them when you drop an affiliate program, you get links back to your domain, and you get page-views that enhance your Alexa rank. You may go here to get the two kinds of code to choose from: http://www.selfseo.com/story-13929.php There's also an inventory there of cloaking ser-vices if you opt to go that way. Regardless of how you get it done, cloaking your affiliate links can protect your affiliate earnings and save yourself you time and trouble in the long run.