Unfortunately, like most crime in the world, link theft is on the rise. It is for this reason alone that more and more people are turning to link cloaking services. Once you have cloaked your affiliate links you are in a great position for tracking your link hits but more importantly, foiling the attempts made by link thieves to ride on the back of your success.

Personally, link left makes my blood boil. The shameful thing is that we don't tend to do anything about it until we become a victim of it. IT'S JUST CRAZY! We wouldn't leave our home with all the doors left open and allow anyone to just walk in and take all our possessions. We lock up and in some cases take out extra security measures as a means of preventing such crime.

So why do we not do the same in order to protect all our hard work and potential revenue from affiliate marketing? If you are anything like me, I had very cavalier, "oh it will never happen to me" attitude towards it but this was ultimately my undoing. As soon as I realized I had become the victim of link theft, I was left with no other choice than to go through my website, page by page and change all the links one by one. So what is link theft I hear you say?

What Is Link Theft?

Link theft involves the unscrupulous behavior of an individual who is intent on stealing the commissions your affiliate links earn. They do this by hacking into your site and covertly replacing your affiliate links with their own affiliate links.

So while work really hard to drive lots of targeted traffic to your website, you are completely unaware that all that traffic is being driven to some other persons affiliate links. As a result, they end up being rewarded with the commissions instead of you.

How To Prevent Link Theft

Fortunately, there are measures you can take to prevent link theft. Cloaking your links and tracking your link hits are probably the most popular ways to protect your affiliate links. Link cloaking just involves disguising your affiliate link and tracking your link hits will indicate any sudden drops in traffic to you your affiliate links.

If you notice a sudden drop in hits to any of your affiliate links, particularly if over a unusually long period of time, you can go and investigate the links on that web page and check their make-up and structure. If you spot any signs of tamper, strip them out and insert a new link.

Ordinarily, you would need to cloak a link first in order to track it. This can be done with link cloaking software. Some link cloaking software will also enable you to track your links clicks and hits too. This is ideal for keeping your affiliate links secure.

Final Thoughts

On thins is for certain, if your affiliate links are attacked by a link thief and it goes unnoticed by you, you could stand to lose a lot of money over time. What you have to remember is that even if you are new to affiliate marketing, one day your site may be earning big commissions.

My advice and best practice is to start cloaking your links from the outset and tracking your link hits is then imperative. You don't have to be checking your links every 2 minutes of the day. Just check your stats once a week to be sure you are not being targeted by a link fraudster.