Friday, June 15, 2007

Tracking Links and Cloaking

This almost sounds like keywords out of a Star Trek convention but not quite.  If you do any work with affiliate programs or if you are working with some of the great new CPA Blogging Collaboratives then you may want to pay attention to how effective your blog articles really are at leveraging your readership.  That's where Tracking Links come into play giving you information about what is really going on in your blog.

Similarly, you sometimes need to cloak your own IP address when you are working to set up these programs.  For example, I'm currently putting together an article comparing three different services.  Two are available only in the United States and the other is only available in Canada.  I'm located in the United States but have hundreds of subscribers from Canada and many search engine related readers as well.

If I want to look at a link and see how it will look to someone from Canada, I won't have a chance if I click on the link from my US based IP address.  But if I go through a cloaking site, I can see the same thing that my Canada readers will see and therefore I can insure that I am designing the pages effectively and also that the links are working!

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