Keeping destination addresses to yourself

April 13th, 2007

I've finally found some simple javascript for affiliate or other links you want to partially cloak. It works well in IE 6 and hides the destination altogether in Firefox. It does not work in Safari. I'd like to know if it would work in IE 7 but as 60% of all visitors to my client websites are still running IE 6, that's already a good start.

Why would you want something like this on your website?

If you are selling anything via an affiliate link people don't like the strange syntax and will often avoid clicking on the link, even though clicking on your affiliate link does them absolutely no harm. In general, having control over one's display URL. It will also help you with the search engines. They judge a website by the content of its outbound links.
So this way you can link to the top level address of any given domain, rather than to a convuluted affiliate link, making Google happy.

I'd like to show you the code but alas Xstandard is acting up again and won't seem to respect the code tag.

Without Xstandard, I'm back with the basic example:

<a href="http://www.affiliate-link.com/" target="_top" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.company-name.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">Shop at Company Name!</a>