You click a link in a blog post that reads example.com/go/kitchen-scale, and a moment later you land on a product page on a completely different domain, one with a URL packed with tracking codes and an affiliate ID forty characters long. That short link did not point at the product directly. It pointed at a redirect the site owner controls, and the redirect sent you on. That is link cloaking, and it is a lot more ordinary than the word suggests.
What link cloaking actually is
Link cloaking is the practice of replacing a long, ugly destination URL with a short link on your own domain that redirects visitors to the real one. Instead of pasting a raw affiliate URL into a post, a site owner creates a link like /go/kitchen-scale or /recommends/kitchen-scale, and that link does the work of sending the visitor onward. The visitor never sees the messy original URL. The site owner gets a link they control, on their own domain, that they can update later without touching every post that mentions it.
Under the hood this is nothing exotic. It is a redirect, tracked at the server, with a slug that means something to a reader instead of a wall of query parameters. Plugins that handle this well store the destination once, generate the short link, and log each click so the site owner can see which posts are actually driving traffic to which offers.
Why sites bother with it
The most immediate reason is trust. A raw affiliate URL is long, often has a partner ID sitting in plain view, and looks like something a reader would want to avoid clicking. A branded link on the site’s own domain reads as a normal internal link instead.
There is also a maintenance reason. Affiliate programs restructure their URLs, products get discontinued and replaced, and tracking codes expire. When the link lives in one place, updating it once, in the redirect target, fixes it everywhere the short link was used, rather than requiring a search through years of published posts to swap out a dead URL.
The third reason is data. A cloaked link can be tracked at the point of the redirect, so the site owner can see how many clicks a specific post or a specific placement generated, independent of whatever reporting the affiliate network provides on its own end. That is click data the site actually owns.
The part that is genuinely about SEO
There is a real technical side to this, and it is worth getting right rather than guessing at.
Affiliate and sponsored links are supposed to carry a rel="nofollow sponsored" attribute. This tells search engines that the link is a paid or affiliate relationship rather than an editorial endorsement, which is the distinction search engines have asked publishers to make for years. It is a labelling convention, not a punishment, and it is easy to apply automatically at the point the cloaked link is created rather than remembering to add it by hand on every post.
The redirect itself should be a 302, a temporary redirect, rather than a 301 permanent redirect. Affiliate destinations change often enough that treating them as permanent is the wrong signal to send, and a temporary redirect keeps that flexibility without confusing crawlers about where the authority of the link should sit.
Get both of those right and a cloaked affiliate link is doing exactly what it is supposed to do: a normal, disclosed, correctly labelled redirect that happens to live on a short, memorable URL.
The other kind of cloaking, and why it matters to separate the two
Here is the distinction that matters most, because it is probably most of what a search for this term turns up. “Cloaking” is also the name for a genuinely deceptive practice: showing search engine crawlers one destination or one piece of content while sending human visitors somewhere else entirely. That version of cloaking is a violation of search engine guidelines, because it means the page being ranked is not the page people actually see.
Link cloaking in the affiliate sense described above is not that. A crawler that follows /go/kitchen-scale gets redirected to the same product page a human visitor gets redirected to. Nothing is being shown selectively. The link is labelled as sponsored, the redirect is visible and consistent for every visitor including crawlers, and there is no second, hidden version of the destination. Same content, same destination, for everyone. The word overlap between “redirecting an affiliate link” and “serving different content to Googlebot” is unfortunate, but the two practices are not related, and only one of them is a problem.
If a piece of content you have read on this topic treats every redirect as suspect, it is talking about the deceptive kind. A branded, disclosed, consistently-redirecting affiliate link on your own domain is a normal and accepted way to run affiliate content.
Cloaking a link does not remove the need to disclose it
This is worth stating plainly: shortening a URL changes how the link looks, not what it is. A cloaked affiliate link is still an affiliate link, and the disclosure obligations that come with affiliate or sponsored content still apply. Readers should be able to tell, from a disclosure statement on the post or the page, that a link sends them somewhere the site has a financial relationship with. Cloaking the URL is about presentation and maintenance. It is not a way to make a sponsored link look like it isn’t one, and treating it that way is what turns an ordinary practice into the kind of thing that draws complaints.
Setting this up without building it from scratch
Handling this manually, one link at a time, works for a handful of affiliate links. It stops working once a site has dozens of them scattered across years of posts, each needing the nofollow attribute applied by hand and each needing a manual edit if the destination changes.
WB Ad Manager’s link cloaking handles the pieces described above without extra setup: branded /go/ links on your own domain, rel="nofollow sponsored" applied automatically, and 302 redirects rather than permanent ones. If you’re migrating an existing set of links from something like ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links, or want to see the fuller feature set including keyword auto-linking and link analytics, the use case walkthrough covers what that setup looks like end to end. What ships free versus what requires the Pro add-on is laid out plainly on the free versus Pro page, and the comparison page covers how this stacks up against other link management plugins if you’re weighing options. For the full feature rundown, the link cloaking page is the place to start.