Adult affiliate link cloaking means putting your affiliate links behind short redirects on your own domain, like yoursite.com/crak/, so you can repoint them in one place and keep them out of Google’s index. Done right (a temporary 302 or 307 redirect, a noindex header on the redirect, rel="sponsored" on the link) it is safe for SEO and allowed by the big adult programs, with one condition: the network must still see which site the visitor came from. This guide is part of my adult affiliate marketing guide.
Don’t confuse it with what Google calls cloaking: showing search engines different content than visitors. That is spam and gets sites removed. Raw affiliate URLs look messy, break when a network changes its tracking domain, and force you to edit every post to swap an offer. A redirect plugin fixes that. Below: what these links do, which redirect code to use, what the adult networks’ terms say, which plugin to use, and the setup that keeps Google happy.
What link cloaking does
A plugin turns a tracking URL like https://affiliates.network.com/access/create-account?r=54876&sub=xyz into a short one on your own domain, like yoursite.com/crak/, that redirects to the network link. What you get:
- Swap offers in one place. Change the destination once and every link across the site follows. When a network changes domains or you switch programs, you don’t touch a single post.
- Cleaner links. A branded URL looks like part of your site instead of a tracking string.
- Fewer blocked links. Some forums, social sites and spam filters block known affiliate-network domains. A link on your own domain doesn’t show one.
- Click counts. The plugins log clicks per link, so you see what gets clicked before anything converts.
It doesn’t hide your affiliate ID. The visitor lands on the network’s URL with your ID in the address bar, same as before. And it doesn’t hide your site from the network either, which matters for the terms below.
Redirects vs Google’s “cloaking”
The two share a name and nothing else. Google’s spam policies define cloaking as “presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users”, for example showing Googlebot a clean page and visitors something else. That gets a site demoted or dropped. An affiliate redirect sends everyone, Googlebot included, to the same place, and the same policy page says “there are many legitimate, non-spam reasons to redirect one URL to another”. Its test for a sneaky redirect is “whether or not the redirect is intended to deceive either the users or search engines”. Keep your redirects doing one thing: one destination for every visitor, no special treatment for bots, and no redirects that swap a page’s content based on who’s asking.
The same page covers paid links. Google says buying and selling links is “a normal part of the economy of the web” and not a violation “as long as they are qualified with a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute value”. An affiliate link is a paid link, so it needs one of those.
301 vs 302 vs 307 for affiliate links
Use a temporary redirect, 302 or 307, for affiliate links. A 301 is for pages that have moved for good, and it has two side effects you don’t want on a link you plan to repoint: browsers cache it, and Google treats the destination as the URL that counts.
| Code | What Google does with it | Browser cache | For affiliate links |
|---|---|---|---|
| 301 permanent | Treats the target as the canonical URL | Yes, by default | No: returning visitors can keep hitting the old offer after you change it |
| 302 found | Follows it, doesn’t treat the target as canonical | No, unless told to | Yes: Pretty Links’ default |
| 307 temporary | Same as 302 | No, unless told to | Yes: the same as 302 for a normal click |
Sources for the table: Google’s redirects documentation (updated April 2026) says a permanent redirect is a signal “that the redirect target should be canonical”, and that for temporary redirects (it lists 302, 303 and 307) “the indexing pipeline doesn’t use the redirect as a signal”. The HTTP standard (RFC 9110) says “a 301 response is heuristically cacheable”, meaning browsers may store it without being told to, and it says no such thing about 302 or 307. MDN notes that “307 and 302 responses are identical when the request method is GET”, which is what a click on a link is. The only difference is for form submissions, which affiliate links aren’t.
My own links were set up as 301s years ago; I switched them to 307 in September 2026. They now answer with a 307 and an x-robots-tag: noindex, nofollow, sponsored header. Pretty Links changed its advice in version 4: its redirect types doc now says “Sharing an affiliate link? 302”, and marks 307 as deprecated (older 307 links keep working, and their edit screen shows “307 Temporary Redirect (legacy)”, but you can’t pick it for a new link). If you’re setting up new links today, pick 302. If you already have 307s, there is no reason to change them.
What adult networks say about cloaking and masking
The programs I checked ban two things: hiding where the traffic came from, and changing their links. None of them bans a plain redirect on your own domain. Here is what each set of terms says, read on 29 September 2026:
| Program | What the terms say | What it means for your links |
|---|---|---|
| AdultForce (Aylo) | Section 8.3: “Referring URLs may not be cloaked, hidden, spoofed, or otherwise obscured (including but not limited to the use of a redirecting page) such as that Aylo cannot reasonably determine the site from which a customer has been directed to join.” | A server redirect is fine as long as the referrer survives. No referrer-stripping redirects, no redirecting page with no content. |
| AWEmpire (LiveJasmin) | Clause 5.3.1: you must comply with “the Link Scheme Guidelines of Google” in your links to their sites, or they can terminate you “without notice”. Clause 1.6: their “hypertext links” may not be “altered, modified or changed”. | Your links to AWE must carry rel="sponsored" or nofollow. Redirect to the exact link AWE gives you. |
| CrakRevenue | Terms effective 1 January 2026, section 5.6: no “spam, content locking and other deceitful tactics”, including “link code hack and unauthorized landing page alteration”. No clause on redirects. | Redirect to the link as generated. Don’t edit its parameters. |
| Chaturbate | Appendix B: commissions are only paid on signups that “directly result from clicking on your User Referral Links”. No clause on redirects. | The redirect has to land on your referral link, intact. |
The AdultForce clause is the strictest, and it’s worth knowing how a redirect treats the referrer. With a normal server redirect (301, 302 or 307), the browser keeps the original page as the referrer when it follows the redirect, so the network still sees your site (by default, browsers send just the domain, like https://yoursite.com/, to another site). What breaks it is a link with rel="noreferrer", a Referrer-Policy: no-referrer header on your site, or a meta-refresh redirect. Pretty Links Pro sells that last one as a feature: its “What’s new” screen says “Meta Refresh even clears the Referer header, so merchants can’t see where your affiliate clicks came from”. On an AdultForce link, that is the exact thing section 8.3 prohibits. Program terms are covered in my AdultForce review, LiveJasmin (AWEmpire) review, CrakRevenue review and Chaturbate review.
Masking, where your URL stays in the address bar and the offer loads in a frame, mostly doesn’t work on adult sites anyway. On 29 September 2026 Stripchat answered with x-frame-options: deny, LiveJasmin with x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN, and Brazzers with a frame-ancestors rule that only allows its own domains. All three refuse to load inside your page.
Which plugin
Pretty Links: the default
Pretty Links is simple and the free version does what a beginner needs: branded slugs, 301 and 302 redirects (307 for older links), click tracking, and nofollow and sponsored settings. The links on this site (/crak/, /chat/, /awe/) are Pretty Links. Pro adds automatic keyword linking, split tests and the extra redirect types (cloak, JavaScript, meta refresh), from $99.60 for the first year on one site; the pricing page says renewals are at full price, $249. You can launch and earn on the free version. If you’re not sure what to install, install this.
ThirstyAffiliates: the alternative
ThirstyAffiliates is the other established option, built for managing affiliate links. The free version handles the redirects (301, 302 or 307), link categories, click stats, and nofollow and extra rel values such as sponsored. Its links use a /recommends/ prefix by default, which you can change. Automatic keyword linking and geo redirects are in the paid version, also from $99.60 for the first year on one site ($249 at renewal). Pick it over Pretty Links if you’ll manage a large library of links and want them sorted into categories.
A server redirect, if you’re technical
If you run your own server, a few lines in .htaccess or an Nginx redirect map do the same job with no plugin and no PHP load. You lose the click counts and the admin screen, and you have to add the noindex header yourself. Most affiliates are better off with a plugin until they have enough links to make the DIY route worth it.
Set it up without hurting SEO
- Use a temporary redirect, 302 for new links (Pretty Links’ default) or 307 if that’s what you already have. The table above explains why not 301.
- Mark links sponsored. Affiliate links should carry
rel="sponsored". Google’s outbound links guide saysnofollow“is still an acceptable way to flag them, though sponsored is preferred”, and you can use both. Put it on the link in your post:/crak/is on your own domain, so without it Google sees an ordinary internal link. - Turn on the plugin’s nofollow option so the redirect itself answers with a noindex header. I read both plugins’ code: Pretty Links sends
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollowwhen nofollow is ticked (and addssponsoredwhen that’s ticked too), and ThirstyAffiliates sendsX-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollowon its nofollow links. - Don’t block the redirects in robots.txt. Most guides that rank for this tell you to, and it works against the noindex header. Google’s noindex documentation says that if a URL is blocked by robots.txt “the crawler will never see the noindex rule, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it”.
- Keep slugs short and branded.
/crak/beats/go/crakrevenue-affiliate-signup-link/. - Leave the referrer alone. No
rel="noreferrer"on affiliate links and no meta-refresh redirects, so the network can see your site (see the AdultForce clause above).
Check a link in ten seconds
Run curl -I https://yoursite.com/crak/ in a terminal. You want to see a 302 or 307, a location: line with your full affiliate link and ID in it, and an x-robots-tag line with noindex. If the location is missing your ID, or you see a 301, fix the link in the plugin. A browser’s developer tools (Network tab) show the same thing, but browsers cache 301s, so test in a private window.
Tracking is the other half
Redirect links make your links clean and swappable. They don’t tell you which ones convert. Pair them with conversion tracking: at minimum your networks’ sub-ID parameters, and a full tracker with postbacks once you buy traffic (the tracking software guide compares them). If you send traffic to a network smartlink instead of a single offer, the redirect setup is the same; smartlinks vs direct offers covers when that makes sense. The beginner’s guide covers how the pieces fit, and the CPA networks guide covers the networks themselves.
FAQ
Does link cloaking hurt SEO?
Not when every visitor and Googlebot get the same redirect, the link carries rel="sponsored" and the redirect sends a noindex header. Google’s spam policies only object to redirects meant to deceive and to paid links that aren’t marked.
Can I use a public shortener like bit.ly instead?
You can, but the link then lives on someone else’s domain: you can’t add the noindex header, and if that service blocks adult destinations or shuts down, every link breaks at once. A plugin on your own domain avoids both.
Do I still need to disclose cloaked affiliate links?
Yes. The redirect only changes how the URL looks, and it is still an affiliate link. Say near the link that it’s an affiliate link and that you may earn from it.
In short: install Pretty Links (or ThirstyAffiliates), put every affiliate link behind it from day one, mark them sponsored, and use 302 or 307 redirects with the plugin’s nofollow option on. It takes about fifteen minutes and saves you from rewriting the whole site the next time a network changes its URL.
Update log
- 29 September 2026: corrected the SEO advice: affiliate link cloaking is separate from Google’s cloaking policy, a temporary redirect with a noindex header and rel=”sponsored” replaces the robots.txt block, and cloaking doesn’t protect your affiliate ID. Added the 301 vs 302 vs 307 table, what four programs’ terms say about cloaking and redirects, the referrer checks, plugin prices, the curl test and the FAQ.
Where the facts in this guide come from: methodology.