Affiliate link hijacking is one of the major problems that affiliate marketers face. This happens especially in the make money online and Internet marketing niche. Many buyers of these products will replace your affiliate links with their own.

This happens a lot with clickbank products. Let's review the different methods to protect your affiliate commissions. You worked so hard to drive traffic to the merchant, and you don't want to lose the sale for a mistake you can avoid.

1. Meta redirects

You can use meta redirects to protect your affiliate links from thieves. Basically, you have to add a piece of code to your webpage, and your visitor won't know that he is on another website.

Let me give you an example. Your site is dogtraining.com and you want to redirect your visitors to another site: youraffid.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net. Instead or sending him to this url, you would give him the impression that he is still on your website with an url like this: dogtraining.com/book/

2. Php redirect

I prefer php redirects because it's simple and you will not lose commissions this way. The only problem is that the page will not be masked like with the meta redirect method.

3 Link Shrinking sites

You can use a web based site like tynurl to shorten the link for you, but I don't recommend this. Why? Because I used one of those site, and it went down. As a result, my affiliate links were not working anymore. What a waste.

4. Use a software

If you don't want to mess up with codes, you can use a link cloaker software, there are dozens of these online. And most of them are free and will do the work. MyLinkGuard is one of these.

Another advantage of these link cloaking softwares is that they make your url shorter. Many people don't like to click on these long and ugly links.

Also, it's not professional to send these long links if you are an email marketer. Many people don't like to receive affiliate links, and people hate being sold.

If you are promoting clickbank products or products that let people see the affiliate id, you may be losing a lot of affiliate commissions.

With a link cloaking software like MyLinkGuard, you will not lose your commissions.