I am using the html <a> tag within wich appears the <img>. I have hundreds of these pointing to merchant sites. The problem is that the links show with my affliate ID and other giberish when you hover the mouse over a link.
How can I hide the link from showing in the status bar using the <a> tag?
Most of the options require me to cut and paste the links before I get a shortened one. I have thousands of links. Cutting and pasting one by one will not be practicable. I already have an automated way of making changes to all the links at once. I was wondering what I need to add to this process to cloak or hide the links or display a preffered text.
You can’t block the link displaying in the status bar as browsers do not allow it for security reasons (sites displaying copies of bank login screens and overriding the status bar for links to that page to show the address of the real bank login page). So anything you want to do to hide part of the info will mean processing all of the links individually.
The only way you could handle it automatically is if you are generating the HTML from a server side script and have that set to do all the changing for you.
Sorry Ibexy, Felgall appears to be right.
I tested out the sites in the search I posted in IE6 and they were hidden, but on newer browsers they were not.
There are many solutions out there to redirect and track links though.
I think removing the underline from the hyperlinks is a better one solution. hope that it will work for you.
I saw it done on other sites. The links and images were not showing the usual affiliate numbers and other jargon stuff on the status bar. There has to be a way to do this. I tried using the onmouseover feature in the <a> tag but its not been respected by my browser.
Well, I will patiently wait till a solution comes along. Thanks for the responses.
Are you using WordPress or another CMS?
The only way to do it is to change the links themselves within the web page and to dynamically add the affiliate code after the person clicks on the link.
Am using Drupal.
Sorry to bother you but could you please give me more light on how to do this please?
Change all the links to point to somewhere that does a redirect to the addresses you really want.
Alright I give up 
After dozens of search on google, I found I could use 301 redirect in my .htaccess file. I have lots of affiliate links all in the form:
w w w .merchant_name.com/pclick.php?p=xxxxxxxxx&a=yyyyy&m=jjjj
in the above, xxxxxxx is, I presume, a product number that always varies. yyyyy is my affiliate, jjjj another 4 digit number that varies.
On my site, I want to show the links as:
http://www.mysite.com/product-xxxxxxxxx (using the product number)
I am stuck with how to write a generic redirection rule in my .htaccess to point to the correct url.
Somebody save me
Note that creating this rule in your .htaccess does not change any of your links. You still have to change them all yourself. This will only handle redirecting the clicks on the new links after you’ve changed them all.
Yes I know that. I am able to rewrite all the url to the form:
http://www.mysite.com/product-xxxxxxxxx
Actually I work with a feed which I import into excel. So its easy to make the urls look the way I want them. Am just not able to handle the .htaccess side of it.
The original urls have the form:
w w w .merchant_name.com/pclick.php?p=xxxxxxxxx&a=yyyyy&m=jjjj
as explained above.
Thanks
I cant believe the amount of trash and duplicate information on this topic I found on the internet. Now I know why Google penalises people. All the topics are about 301 redirection quite alright but the actual and crucial issue of writing one single rule that affects multiple links is nowhere to be found. Some articles are so funny I burst out laughing even though am seriously looking for a solution to this problem. You would immediately see through it all that the writer has no clue what they were talking about.
Anyway, I still am waiting for a good samaritan to save me 2 days headache. How on earth do I write a .htaccess 301 redirect for my affiliate links.
I sent you to a site with a regular expression tutorial, that’s what you need, you just have to write the pattern that matches the URLs you want – here it is:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product\\-([0-9]+) http://www.example.com/pclick.php?p=$1&a=12345&m=12345 [R=301,L]
There are also great tutorials on this in the Apache Configuration forum right here, in the sticky posts.
Thanks for helping.
I tried the codes above but its not working for me. Sorry I did not notice the link you previously gave. I checked it out though but I dont understand a thing of whats been said there. I think that site is for experts which am not.
I tested that rule. It will redirect a request for http://www.yoursite.com/product-11111 to http://www.example.com/pclick.php?p=11111 &a=12345&m=12345
That’s what I interpreted you asking for in post #13, is it not right?
I finally used one of the php jump scripts to solve the problem. Basically I structure the url to be:
http://www.mysite.com/product.php?p=yyyyyy.xxxx
Product.php is a script where the link is “re-assembled” and is called. I found this on the net after a whole day search on google. Of course I modified it to suit my taste.
I hope this method is aggreable with Google. Anyway, I see loads of affiliate sites using it.