RomansFrith

Firstly, a quick search around the forum and you would have an answer within seconds, especially from within the "Cloaking" Sub-forum, but i'll bite. Cloaking is essentially a way of hiding or disguising your affiliate links. So for example if you were doing a review for a product with the aim of promoting it via your affiliate link then you would have to give them a link to click. Now on your affiliate network you would be given a special URL linking to the product so they can identify that the sale has been generated by you. However, you don't want the potential customers to be able to see that your review is just a disguised promotion so you will want to make sure that they can't see your affiliate URL when they click it. Firstly because it might make them distrust the legitimacy of the information and secondly because it looks messy with random characters and also your affiliate ID. So the idea of cloaking is to make the link they click look much nicer and far more legitimate. This can be done simply by using a service like bit.ly or others to shorten your link, and then insert that instead of your affiliate URL (it will still lead the user there but it will look nicer) or you can get plugins (if you are using wordpress) and some themes have an affiliate cloaker built in. Sorry for the length of this but i figured if i was gonna answer i may as well answer properly.