Here’s a simple php script that you can use to not only cloak the referrer information, but also to rotate through your affiliate links so that you can test different offers and/or different advertising networks.

In order to hide your traffic sources you need to send the user through a double-redirect before pushing them along to the advertisers page. This can be done many different ways, but for the sake of this post I’m just going to use a very basic PHP redirect. For this setup, have the offer link on your landing page point to link.php, which will immediately redirect them to offer.php. Once they reach offer.php it will randomly select one of the affiliate links and redirect them on to their final destination. It’s that simple.

link.php

<?php
/* Redirect browser */
header("Location: offer.php");
/* Now the next line just makes sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */
exit;
?>

Now here’s the second file – You’ll want to replace the URL’s with YOUR affiliate links. If you’d like to add or remove offers just add or remove one of the “$affiliateoffer[] = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=1788&t202kw=’” lines.

offer.php

<?php
$r = $_GET['sub'];
$affiliateoffer[] = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=1788&t202kw=';
$affiliateoffer[] = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=2788&t202kw=';
$affiliateoffer[] = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=3788&t202kw=';
$affiliateoffer[] = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4788&t202kw=';
$affiliateoffer[] = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=5788&t202kw=';
srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
$random_number = rand(0,count($affiliateoffer)-1);
$dur = ($affiliateoffer[$random_number]);
$moneysite = $dur.$r;
header("Location: $moneysite");
?>

There you go, now you’re safeguarding your leads as well as testing out networks/offers. Remember, the secret to having sustainable campaigns is to always be testing!

A great way to scrub referrals (and help cloak affiliate links from Google) is by sending your users to a ‘middleman’ redirect page before handing them off to the Advertiser. With some offers though it’d be nice to be able to deliver one final ‘parting’ message or chance for up-sell before having them leave your site. For those situations I’ve found it handy to build out the ‘middleman’ pages using a javascript redirect timer that lets me delay the eventual redirect for however long I think is necessary for the visitor to read my farewell message or see that ‘last-minute-offer.’

So that the user will know this is all part of the website experience, a simple countdown timer is shown letting them see how much time is left before the page changes. There’s even a secondary option in the script that allows for a short one-liner to be displayed during the eventual redirect, though the transition is typically too quick for anyone to read (so it isn’t mandatory, if left blank it will default to say “Redirecting…”).

Download countdownRedirect.js

/**
 * Copyright (C) 2006-2009, QuietAffiliate.com. All rights reserved.
 *
 * Script Name: Countdown Redirect
 *
 * THIS SOURCE CODE MAY BE USED FREELY PROVIDED THAT
 * YOU DO NOT REMOVE THIS MESSAGE.
 *
 * You can obtain this script at http://www.QuietAffiliate.com
 */

function countdownRedirect(url, msg)
{
   var TARG_ID = "COUNTDOWN_REDIRECT";
   var DEF_MSG = "Redirecting...";

   if( ! msg )
   {
      msg = DEF_MSG;
   }

   if( ! url )
   {
      throw new Error('You didn\'t include the "url" parameter');
   }

   var e = document.getElementById(TARG_ID);

   if( ! e )
   {
      throw new Error('"COUNTDOWN_REDIRECT" element id not found');
   }

   var cTicks = parseInt(e.innerHTML);

   var timer = setInterval(function()
   {
      if( cTicks )
      {
         e.innerHTML = --cTicks;
      }
      else
      {
         clearInterval(timer);
         document.body.innerHTML = msg;
         location = url;
      }

   }, 1000);
}

To use just upload the countdownRedirect.js script to your webserver and add the following code to the header on your ‘middleman’ page:

<script src="countdownRedirect.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

In order to have the countdown start automatically once the page is loaded, you’re going to want to then add the ‘onload’ attribute to the main ‘body’ tag. This is also where you’ll tell the script what page to eventually redirect the user to as well as what (if any) redirect message to display:

in this example the eventual redirect will be to http://www.QuietAffiliate.com with no secondary redirect message

<body onload='countdownRedirect("http://www.QuietAffiliate.com")'>

If I wanted to change the default redirect message, “Redirecting…”, to something different (i.e. “Thank You For Visiting”), then I would use:

<body onload='countdownRedirect("http://www.QuietAffiliate.com", "Thank You For Visiting")'>

Now build-out your page as desired. The only thing missing is to tell the script how long the countdown is for and then display the timer on the page. We do that by adding the following code in with our content:

in this example I have the countdown timer set to 10 seconds, you can adjust accordingly

<span class="counter" id="COUNTDOWN_REDIRECT">10</span>

There you go! You can change how the countdown timer looks via CSS. This is the most basic example of how you can use this script but hopefully it saves you some time/gives you some ideas.

Here’s the code for a demo page using the above options:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<html>
<head>
<title>QuietAffiliate.com Javascript Countdown Redirect Demo</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

<style type="text/css">
body {
   color: black;
   background: white;
   font: bold 18pt Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
   text-align: center;
}

span.counter {
   color: red;
   cursor: default;
   font-size: larger;
}

div.info {
   margin: 0 auto;
   text-align: left;
   font-size: smaller;
   width: 80%;
   margin-top: 2em;
}
</style>

<script src="countdownRedirect.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>

<body onload='countdownRedirect("http://www.QuietAffiliate.com", "Thanks For Visiting")'>

<div>QuietAffiliate.com - countdownRedirect.js Demo Page</div>

<div class="info">This is a demo page of the redirect script in action, code and instructions can be found at <strong>QuietAffiliate.com</strong><br /><br /><center>You will automatically be redirected in <span class="counter" id="COUNTDOWN_REDIRECT">10</span> seconds.</center>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Visit Live Demo | Download Demo Page (with countdownRedirect.js)