Mouseovers to hide referral code - Yes or No?
 

I noticed a lot of webmasters hide the referral code in their affiliate links so that it just shows the name of the site and omits the referral ID from the destination url displayed.

What are peoples thoughts on this? Good idea or bad?

My own thoughts are if you have a lot of referral links on the page using this method will bloat your code which may be detrimental to search engine positions. I'm not sure how many surfers pay attention to the detination url anyway.

Has anyone conducted any tests on performance of one over the other?

When done correctly that out perform regular links by a small margin. Surfers don't really pay attention to where anymore but if you have one of those huge codes that coverers the bottom of their browser more likely than not the won't buy.

You can always try sending them to a simple php redirect, or FPA page.

Something like:
www.mydomain.com/hot-teen-slut-site/

I really don't bother. My feeling is that most surfers don't care, and those that do are usually set up to find out when browser location shennagins are going on anyway. They'll percieve this as hostile, and you'll lose a possible sale.

Plus, there's the fact that I hate it when I swap my 'smut dealer' and 'smut surfer' hats.

I think most surfers don't know what a referrer code is and pay very little attention to the status bar anyway. It's not worth the effort IMHO.

newbie question
 

this might sound like a dumb question, but when I see 'no mouse overs', does that mean no promotional text, like "check this out" or just no links?

sorry, but I'm still learning what I can and can't do. |huh

Thanks

Grinch

Grinch,
A mouseover is a bit of code put in your anchor text that will display whatever text you want on the bottom of some browser windows.
a href="yourlinkcodegoeshere" onMouseover="window.status='text to be displayed when the link is moused over'; return true" onMouseout="window.status=' '; return true"
It is different than text that displays on your page. My own feeling is that mouseovers are a waste of time and coding on a page.

As far as text links on your page, lots of good text that is reletive to your site is encouraged by search engines and link list owners. It will be your best friend when it comes to sales. ;)

When I first began in this biz, years ago, mouseovers were a wonderful thing. I am a born again newbie and appreciate your input, Maj. Stress.

I used to use 'em when I had no traffic. Now I don't even bother, cuz I'm too busy trying to get traffic.

I use mouseovers when building sites, primarily because I feel it makes the surfing experience just a shade better. The small percentage of surfers who don't like clicking on links with big ref codes still have credit cards, and I can't think of a single LL that doesn't allow them as long as the destination site is still shown.