Protecting Your Hoplinks
June 11th, 2008
Posted by Greg Lems, VP of Information Technology
Remember the good old days, when you could put a personal check in an envelope and leave it in your mailbox with the little red flag up? Nowadays the media is full of reports about identity theft rings, some of which collect bank account information by harvesting checks from mailboxes. Although incidents of this nature have increased in recent years, the overall chances of it happening are actually still quite low. Nevertheless, I won’t leave an outgoing check in my mailbox, because it can’t hurt to be extra safe.
In a somewhat similar manner, it is important for ClickBank publishers and affiliates to protect their Hoplink information. Hoplinks are the key to the ClickBank Marketplace. Affiliates create them to promote publisher products, and publishers rely on them to drive traffic their way.
ClickBank has put a tremendous amount of effort into the reliability and security of its Hoplink system. It is closely monitored and designed to provide every protection possible, so that affiliates get proper credit for their sales. At its heart, however, the Hoplink system relies on URLs to work and as a result information can be exposed about the affiliate for the sale. Luckily there is a way to avoid such exposure.
“Hoplink theft” is a term used to describe the act of changing Hoplinks so that they credit a different affiliate. A hardworking affiliate may place Hoplinks across many sites on the Internet, but a person with their own ClickBank account and bad intentions could, with some manual steps and scheming, create an identical Hoplink to the hardworking affiliate, but with their own nickname substituted in. This typically happens in one of two places: when a Hoplink is placed in an ad by an affiliate, or at payment time when a publisher attempts a quick hop to a different affiliate just before payment. It isn’t a common problem, and when we encounter it we swiftly discipline the dishonest parties. There are steps, however, that can be taken to prevent it from happening in the first place.
To avoid the first form of Hoplink theft, we recommend cloaking your Hoplinks. This involves the creation of redirects that will take users to the intended destination without showing them the exact URL they are being sent to. This can be done either with a bit of HTML that surrounds the Hoplink, or with some server-side scripts for redirects. More information is available on this topic here:
Protecting Your HopLinks Help Center Article
Additionally, there are 3rd party products available to cloak Hoplinks. Although ClickBank does not specifically endorse any of these products, we encourage anyone seeking cloaking functionality to investigate what’s out there and available, as there are a number of different ways to perform this simple redirect.
To avoid the second form of Hoplink theft, we recommend that you examine the order flow of the products you are promoting to ensure that additional Hoplinks have not been added to the ordering process. The most straightforward way to do this is to click your own Hoplink, view the publisher’s pitch page and then click through to the ClickBank order form. At the bottom of the order form you’ll see an indicator that starts with “affiliate=.” If your Hoplink was constructed correctly, your affiliate nickname will appear there. It is a good practice to regularly check this flow to ensure you receive proper credit for sales.
Hoplink theft is not common. If you suspect it is happening, you can report it to abuse@clickbank.com and our security team will investigate. By cloaking your Hoplink URL and paying attention to the order flow of products you promote, you can ensure protection of your hard-earned ClickBank commission. Just like when mailing a check, the likelihood of something undesirable happening is low, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe.
About Beau BlackwellBeau is the Client Knowledge Guru for ClickBank and covers the latest trends, tips and techniques for building profitable Internet marketing businesses.
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Posted in Strategies for Success | 
Tags: affiliates, clickbank, cloaking, hoplinks, publishers, security
I figured out to check the bottom of the actual sales page to see if my id is present for every product I promote after noticing some affiluiate programs I joined would “drop” my link throughout their ordering process. I believe this is one of the main reasons why many affiliates are gettint their commissions stolen and don’t realize it.
Shall I use Tinyurl.com to cloak my hop link?
Caleb,
Just keep checking your links after a couple hundred hits mate cause i have had the same problem,some will stay there for a couple hundred hits and some will stay there for a thousand hits then when i go back to the purchase page the Affiliate= None.
I am waiting on a further response to an email i have sent.
It in my case is not getting stolen but rather like you said “just” dropping off.(keep that in mind to Jack.
I was given a website which promotes 3 products separately. I checked out the first product as far as the purchase and the affiliate had my name. But I noticed after much traffic with Yahoo that the other 2 products did not have my affiliate name. Therefore I do not know if I had sales or not and if I did have sales they didn’t come to my affiliate. Be careful, you do not get told.
I once tried using a program called affiliate cloner. I set up my links and after a few weeks I followed one of the the links and scrolled down to the bottom of the Clickbank order page. To my surprise the referring affiliate nick name was changed to “JAVA9″ So I closed the page and followed the link again, this time it showed my affiliate ID at the bottom of the CB order page. I did this over the next few days and found that it was alternating between my CD ID and one called “JAVA9″. I said to myself “that’s funny” since the affiliate cloner works by generating a javascript code from your affiliate hop link for you to save and an html file on your domain and then use IT as your referral link to customers. Then for customer to get to the publisher site they must have javascript enables browser (about 96% of browsers are javascript enabled) When my cloned link is followed it this manner there is a split second where i could actually see the script run. I wasn’t sure what is going on so i stopped using the script.
Clickbank does a fantastic job; I predict that they will be doing more to prevent commission theft.
Richard
I was promoting my affiliate links on traffic exchanges (which I have yet to make money) and after a while, my link would have someone else’s name on it.
I personally use http://www.hotshorturl.com
Take Care!
I use domain name forwarding with the domains I have registered at 1and1.com.
I use “frame redirect” which will not show you hoplink. Since domain names are cheap and if you buy them from 1and1 they will forward them for free I have some I’m not using yet.
Why doesn’t clickbank automatically create masked hoplinks for publishers via the marketplace?
In the FAQ section of the Clickbank site I read something about frames and redirections, it says “These are illegal hoplinks”, and therefore NO COMISSION will be payed, does anybody know if it is real?
I have been beating my brains out trying to get the cloaking to work. I have tried both CB recommendations, tinyurl, and a few others. No matter what I do, when I click on my URL ( http://mydomain.com/out/index.php for example, where index.php has the cloaking code), the product page comes up with http://www.xxxxxxcom/?hop=myclickbanklink.
What am I missing?
Thanks,
Roger
Hi oskarincb,
I believe this is because of the system.
It will pass and receive the value through browser. If you used Frame redirect, it will pass the value inside server, means in another words it the other page WILL NOT receive the affiliates value..
So how to trace the commision..??
I have testing a few website using Frame redirect, and sad to say it doesnt work..
But I’m not sure if we put CGI script I will work or not..
This link is great for affiliate’s tools;
http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_tools.html#Affiliate_Tools_2
[...] Clickbank Domain Masking In short, no it’s not illegal Protecting Your Hoplinks | ClickBank Blog "To avoid the first form of Hoplink theft, we recommend cloaking your Hoplinks. This involves [...]
I just tried using a URL shorter and it worked fine.
Does anyone know why Clickbank hoplink redirection sometime results in the following form….
http://www.MERCHANT-SITE.com –> WITHOUT the Clickbank ID.
But most of the time, it is in the following form (where your Clickbank ID is visible)…
http://www.MERCHANT-SITE.com/?hop=YOUR-CB-ID
I prefer to see the first form (without the Clickbank ID shown).
great, but when I click the link I only find this:
The web server cannot find the file you asked for. Check the URL to ensure that the path is correct. Please use the main navigation to continue.
Hi Joeson,
Sorry about that, it was an old link. I’ve updated it to the correct link now.
I really appreciate that
thanks Blackwell
Hello guys! I’m really frustrated couse I can’t find a proper answer for me.
My question is: I want to cloak my aff links, but tiny url or similar services seems a bit am..unprofesional and many people already knew that such shortened url might be an aff link. So i want to cloak a link which I want to look like lets say : www offers (.) com/thebiggestoffer something like that. The most important for me is that I DON’T have a website so I can’t use redirect. Is there a simple way to do that? Thank you!
Melissa,
Unfortunately, if you don’t have your own website, doing nice-looking redirects like the example you gave is tougher. One option would be to just buy a domain name you like, and then use a white-label redirect service like Bit.ly Pro or Awe.sm to create your own redirects using your preferred domain. You’ll have to spend a few bucks a year to own the domain, but you won’t need to pay for hosting, and you can make it look as professional as you want. Hope that helps!
Beau
Thank You very much!
Hi,
we have developed a CB hoplink cloaker which vendors can let their affiliates use to generate links. It’s called ClickPiG and we use it for all our own affiliates.
Apart from protecting the affiliate’s links and so commission, it also allows affiliates to send traffic to ANY URL on the vendor’s site. This could be the homepage, a product sales page, an interesting blog post or even a a question in the vendor’s FAQ, the choice is theirs. So, conversions increase due to a more relevant customer journey.
Everything is tracked using Clickbank cookies in exactly the same way as it would be using traditional hoplinks.
Hopefully more vendors will adopt it – you can always ask them!
Fiona
77bucks Per Annum is quite sizable for ClickPiG especially if the commissions from links just aren’t generating the revenue Fiona. A good set up but I’d look elsewhere.
Hi Drew,
it’s always valuable to hear people’s views on this so I’d be interested to hear more.
Bear in mind this is a vendor product, so the vendor pays once for ClickPiG and then all their affiliates can use it – be it 10 affiliates or 1000 – is $77 p/a still too much? Are we pricing smaller vendors out? What sort of price range would you expect to see for a product like this?
Thanks,
Fiona
By way of an update to my reply above, BlogPiG now offers CloakPiG which is a link cloaker for affiliates themselves. It’s designed for WP sites. It cloaks all your exisiting links within seconds of installation and then automatically cloaks any future affiliate links you post.
Hope it helps,
Fiona
Thanks for the information. I guess WordPress has some plugins for Hoplink protection too.