As you might have noticed, when I link out to a site using an affiliate link, I don’t link out directly through the affiliate program as many do, but it actually looks like an internal link.

There are many reasons for doing this. Basically the link first passes through my link internally on my site before going out to the affiliate program. This is a practice that I highly recommend, I explain why and show you the tool that I use to do it.

Track your clicks

First of all, when you “cloak” your links and send them either through a tool like MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate or a custom piece of software that you develop yourself, you gain the explicit ability to track clicks on the traffic you are sending to various affiliates. This allows you to keep tabs on the numbers you are reporting vs. numbers they report. I personally have seen differences in click numbers from what I was reporting and what my affiliate programs were reporting before, and if affiliate marketing is something that brings you income, you definitely want to be on top of keeping your revenue streams honest.

Keep Google Out

While Google doesn’t necessarily say that they don’t like to see affiliate links on sites, I can’t imagine that they love it. Especially if you are running a site that is full of affiliate links, it can’t be Google’s favorite thing. When you cloak your affiliate links they just look like internal links, and if you use a directory like /hop/ or /recommends/ to pass all your links through like I am on this site, you can simply disallow that directory in your robots.txt file so bots will stay out and leave your aff links alone.

Change All Your Links At Once

What happens if the product you’ve been pushing decides to change affiliate networks? Or if you find a competing product that pays out better commissions and want to switch out all your links? If all of your links are direct, you’re gonna have to go back through your site and find each link by hand and convert them over. But if you have a tool like MBP Ninja Affiliate it just takes a few clicks to change all of the links on your site.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate

For all of these reasons, I use and recommend the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate tool. MBP Ninja Affiliate allows you to cloak your links, track link counts, convert keyworks to ninja links, create groups of links, temporarily suspend link campaigns, and backup all of your data, all in one tool.

I have seen several other tools with similar functionality since I started using MBP, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on them. These other tools, like MBP aren’t free, so I obviously haven’t tried them out cause I’ve loved the functionality of MBP and I don’t have a giant budget for trying out tools, as fun as that would be!

Also, if you decide to go ahead and try out MBP Ninja Affiliate, if you buy before friday they’re running a 30% discount! Let me know what you think!

Here’s a tool that you might not have heard of, SiteCrawler from Lighthead. I have used a lot of crawlers over the years, but not one that is as lightweight, fast, and that downloads an entire website for you as easy as this.

With SiteCrawler, basically you put in a domain, hit “Start” and it crawls and downloads the entire thing for you. Let’s take a look.

This is the first tab of options for SiteCrawler, here you can specify what to crawl, where you want things downloaded, whether or not you want things categorized by sub-directories, and how many downloads at a time you want.

On the restrictions tab you have control over time, size, and number of files per session, along with time and size per file.

The rules panel allows you complete control with the ability to input regular expressions and specific handling commands for crawling and downloading.

The advanced tab gives you the ability to zip downloads, run applescripts and shell commands, as well as specify specific user-agent crawlers.

The fifth and final colum shows progress as the crawl and download takes place. When it’s finished you have a complete copy of the website in exact duplicate directory structure. I downloaded all of XKCD.

If you’re looking for a tool that has this type of functionality, and you use a mac (sorry PC), I recommend this one at an affordable $20. I’ve tried several others and this is by far the best I’ve found yet.

Did we forget something?

Let us know in the comments what tools you use!

SEOmoz announced the launch of a new tool today called Open Site Explorer. It’s their new backlink analysis tool powered by the linkscape index. Lets take a look..

First look, the tool is very pretty, as are all the moz tools. I always enjoy well designed interfaces. OSE offers four measurements on any domain you analyze including: Page Authority, Domain Authority, Number of Linking Root Domains, and Total Links.

OSE features four different tab views for sorting and displaying your backlink data. They include: linking pages, linking domains, anchor text distribution, and full link metrics.

Linking Pages

The linking pages display is what you expect and receive from most other link analysis tools, offering a list display of links to your site from all pages. In addition to other breakdowns that I have seen from backlink analysis tools, OSE give you the ability to display nofollowed, followed, or 301′d links individually to and from external and/or internal pages to any specific page, or pages on the root or subdomain.

This added functionality is something I have been longing for in a link analysis tool for some time, so it is definitely appreciated.

Using my personal blog as a gauge for reporting accuracy, I see that reported links seem to be pretty accurate. When viewing all (followed, nofollowed, 301) links, it OSE gives a nice breakdown of which links are which by notating nofollow links in red, and 301’s in green.

I did notice some minor discrepancy with link reporting at this level as OSE reports a followed link to my blog from Rae Hoffman’s post on ASE, but the only link to me from this page as you can see is a comment link, and clearly nofollowed.

Linking Domains

The linking domains display shows a clear breakdown of all domains linking to your site with their correlating rated domain authority and number of linking root domains. I see this as potentially a great tool for evaluating the value of link prospects.

Anchor Text Distribution

The anchor text distribution layout displays linking anchor text used to link to your page or domain and number of occurrences both from individual links and linking domains. This is similar to the anchor text tool I have used many times from Majestic SEO. I am a bit disappointed that OSE doesn’t offer the ability to view links by anchor text with the same follow, nofollow, 301 lens as on the linking pages display. This is a feature that should definitely be added.

Full Metrics

Last is the full metrics display, which gives a nice overview with additional SEOmoz metrics from the SEOmoz toolset and two graphs that display number of followed vs. nofollowed links and internal vs. external links.

Overall Open Site Explorer is a great tool for backlink analysis, and we’re only looking forward to improvements in the future. Existing SEOmoz Pro members will be pleasantly surprised with the addition of the new tool, and people considering upgrading to pro, well this may just tip the scale.