A url cloaker is a small program that automatically creates an html (or php) page to redirect links. Such pratices are popular among affiliates, where protecting links and making them look professional is vital. There are numerous ways to protect affiliate links, but here we will cover the three most popular and convenient.
First of all, why mask links? A simple reason is to shorten urls. Services like tinyurl.com convert long urls into short ones like www.tinyurl.com/something. However the downside is your like has the brand "tinyurl" on it. Using your own redirection page you can brand your long urls with your own name: www.yourdomain/productname.html.
Affiliate links are important to redirect for additional reasons. One is to make it easier to update the links. Say you distribute a bunch of amazing freebies with your link www.domain.com/product.html that redirects to your affiliated link. If you ever have to change the link, you can update the product.html page without having to update all those freebies you already gave out.
Then there is the question of protecting your links. There are people who, by accident or malice, can use your affiliate links in improper ways and then make you take the heat. With a redirecting page, you can simply delete the html from your server and quickly avoid any further problems.
So let's look at the different ways to redirect. Note for all of them you will need to upload the resulting file into a webhost. There are a lot of nice free ones you can google.
1) Meta Tag
This method only requires the meta redirection tag at the top of a plain html page. Most newer browsers support it without a problem. The downside is it will "break" the Back button.
2) Javascript
This method does not break the Back button and is thus more elegant. However the user needs to have javascript enabled on their browser. Luckily most people do, and for those that do not, you can add a tag afterwards witht he Meta Tag following. I have personally found this combined method to be effective.</p>
<p>3) PHP<br /> This method too will not break the back button. Additionally whether it works or not is not dependent on the user, but on the server. In order words, your webhost needs to support PHP, which most do.</p>
<p>Use any of the three above and you will soon see the benefits. Remember a link like www.yourdomain.com/product.html looks a lot more attractive to a potential customer than rover.com/somethingsomething?numbersnumber?morestuffmorestuff and so on.</p>
<p>These steps can be done manually or you can download a program to automate them for you to speed up the process. <a href="http://vckicks.110mb.com/link_cloaker.html" mce_href="http://vckicks.110mb.com/link_cloaker.html">The Link Cloaker</a> is a free open-source utiliy with support for the three methods discussed.</p></p>