Xoxo, fellas. Reznik here and today we take you for a ride with smart domains and parking links.
Smartlinks are gaining more and more popularity in the CPA sphere every day. No one really knows what kind of shit is it, but in any case the word is beautiful, stylish, fashionable and youthful. Ideally, a smartlink should increase your inflow of bucks, in reality it is also trying hard.
As you know, from a technical point of view, the smartlink works as a redirect, that is, redirects the visitor to the target site. It is generally accepted that Facebook does not like redirects, so they should be avoided. But Facebook loves boobs and dick creams for sure even less, so using the main target domain can also be dangerous.
To solve these enormous problems, clearly invented and having nothing to do with reality, we will take you on a ride to hell of crazy ideas. We’ll park the domain directly on the smart link. As a result, we should get a domain that will show different sites depending on the wishes of the smartlink. Without redirects, iframes, registration and SMS.
Important note! In some cases, depending on the site, a redirect can be used. But! It runs inside the domain, that is, completely safe from the point of view of traffic flow. A redirect will occur if the smartlink doesn’t link to the main page of the target site or sets additional parameters and cookies.
What do we need
The parking procedure does not require any specific knowledge. If you have previously worked with cloaking or your own landing pages, this set will not seem strange to you. If it did not happen, then why should you park the domain for a smartlink?
- Smartlink from your affiliate network or cloaking service.
- Hosting with PHP support. Even the cheapest one will be ok.
- Domain, linked to this hosting.
- A couple of files from AlterCPA White.
You can use any hosting and domain provider which would you like. We will use AlterCPA White as the proxy service. You can learn more about it here: https://gitlab.com/altervision/altercpa-white.
How do we set it up
Setting up will not take you much time. We suppose that you have already purchased a hosting and a domain is already attached to it. The domain opens and shows the dummy page of your hosting. We also hope that you can upload files to this hosting via FTP using, for example, FileZilla.
Step 1. Downloading AlterCPA White
Download AlterCPA White via the following ling: AlterCPA White – and unzip it to any folder you like. You’ll need two files from the archive – index.php and .htaccess, you can remove the rest.
Step 2. Setting up the site
Open index.php file with your favourite code editor (some will open longer than you edit this file) and make the following changes:
Find the line like this (probably line 31):
#define( 'SMARTLINK', 'https://your.smart/link?url' );
Remove # letter from the beginning of the string and replace the URL with your smartlink like this:
define( 'SMARTLINK', 'https://natribu.org/en/' );
If you are not comfortable with using a redirect when you first open the site, add or uncomment a constant that disables the redirect:
define( 'SMARTBASE', true );
Don’t forget to save the file! You can learn the additional configuration settings on the wiki-page of AlterCPA White repository.
Step 3. Uploading files to the hosting
Connect to your FTP hosting using Filezilla or a similar program. Copy .htaccess file from the distribution and index.php you changed to the home folder of your hosting. That’s all, folks!
Pros
It turns out that you need to download the AlterCPA White, enter your smartlink into it and upload it to the hosting. In these three steps, we get a working site that will parse the smart link and show the site that fits the customer. That would be perfect if it weren’t …
Cons and other shitty stuff
Of course, it’s not even good, neither perfect. Such a parked domain will work well only with good quality sites, which unfortunately are a minority. Most likely, it is smartly suitable for product traffic.
Some sites, such as webcam services or dating sites, turned out to be so sophisticated that all the functionality of AlterCPA White is not enough to proxy their traffic. They have a number of protection mechanisms, which by all means should prevent not only fraud, but also our sluggish attempts to display the site through a proxy. They have observed the use of a whole bunch of modern powerful technologies, which are also not possible to intercept and proxy.
Some smartlink providers don’t know how to analyze request headers and client IP addresses, so they will lead visitors anywhere, but not to the correct address.
When creating websites, some webmasters comprehend the zen design of code from shit and sticks, as a result of which all links a ruined on their sites, registration starts nowhere, and instead of a beautiful picture, a sprawling pool of JS excrement appears.
Conclusion
It is possible to park a domain to a smartlink through AlterCPA White, but carefully. Be sure to check the health of the entire mechanism through a proxy.
Thanks y’all, Reznik out!