It made me wonder if I was getting the short end of the stick either from link bypassing or link hijacking.

I was using a simple php redirect that I had seen on one of the forums. You simply put this code in a php file which will redirect the user to the actual site along with your affiliate ID.

< ?php

$redirect_url = 'my affiliate url';

header( "Location: {$redirect_url}" );
?>

This method seems to work OK. The one problem though is that it reveals your affiliate ID in the address bar. It will look something like: www.yourdomain.com/?your_affiliate_id

Some people who see that will chop off your affiliate ID — that’s what they call link bypassing — and so you would miss out on your commission.

Another method to use is revealed on this site: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/affiliate_link_cloaker.htm

Actually, this site dissects how a popular affiliate link cloaker works so that you can implement it yourself. It can hide your actual affiliate ID by using frames. Here is an excerpt from his site.

How Can I Do It For Free?

Follow these steps:

1. Get the “Model Page” code in the box below. The easiest way to do that is to put the cursor in the box, then type Ctrl-A (to select all) and then Ctrl-C to copy it all to the clipboard.

2. Paste the code into your own page to create the basic page. Once this is done all you need to do is to change the title and the URL.

3. Change “–TITLE’–” to whatever title you want.

4. Go to tokira.net/unicode or fantomaster.com/fantomasSuite/shadowCoder/fascodersv-e.cgi

5. Use either of these two pages to translate the URL you want to cloak from “normal” characters to HTML Unicode. (For example, you can type “http://www.Amazon.com” in the top and get the cloaked characters at the bottom.

6. Put this cloaked URL in place of –URL– on your page.

7. Voila. You are done. You have created a cloaked page.

And here is the actual HTML code to use for your own cloaker. Change the [ ] to <> in your code.

You can add lots of blank links after the comment to discourage people from figuring out your affiliate ID which has been obfuscated with the unicode converter.

[ !-- !STOP! WARNING: you are not authorized to view this
Code - Close your text editor immediately -- ]

[html][head][script]window.status = ‘ ‘;[/script][meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"]
[title]–TITLE–[/title][/meta][meta name="keywords" content][/meta][meta name="description" content][/meta][/head][frameset border="0" frameborder="0" marginleft="0" margintop="0" marginright="0" marginbottom="0" rows="100%,*"][frame src=--URL--" scrolling="auto" frameborder="no" border="0" noresize][/frame][frame topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" frameborder="no" border="0" noresize][noframes][body][/body][/noframes][/frame][/frameset]

I’m using both methods on my site to see if it makes a difference.