I have been using GoCodes ever since I started promoting affiliate products on my blog and used to add the plugin to any blog I set up, despite the fact that the plugins weren’t updated for years.
Even though I wanted to move from GoCodes because it was becoming difficult for me to manage all the links, as it didn’t offer any grouping or categorizing of links. But, hey, it worked, and that made me stick to it, until today.
When I tried to install it on a blog for my client, I found that it is no longer available in the WordPress Plugins directory, which means, I won’t be able to put this on the newer blogs I set up in future.
You can still use it by downloading from other places, but it will not be getting updates neither there will be any support for it, (outdated plugins are a threat to the security of your blog).
Free Link Cloaking Alternatives to GoCodes
This forced me to look for alternatives as well as move all my GoCodes links without breaking all the links I used in my posts over the years.
Basically, the Go Codes plugin cloaks the URLs like yourdomain.com/go/customtext
I found Easy Affiliate Links plugin that cloaks links in a similar manner, instead of go, it uses recommends as a slug making the URL looks like yourdomain.com/recommends/customtext , but it is easy to change the slug into go so that the previous users do not break.
The next step would be to create all the links using the same custom text inside the Easy Affiliate Links.
If you have got a lot of links then it might take some time as there is no automated way to do so, but it is better to do it in one place rather than hunting down the links in each blog post to change them.
Categorize Your Affiliate links easily
The other benefit of Easy Affiliate Links is that it lets you Categorize the links you want to cloak, so, you can create a category for every company and then cloak affiliate links from that company under that category.
The plugin is pretty straightforward just like the Go Codes and plus with the ability to Categorize the affiliate links for easier discovery.
I tried another plugin, Pretty Link, the lite version is free and offers categorize and tracking the hits on particular links, however, there is no option to add a slug (like go or recommends) into the links, but with a small trick, you can manage to make your GoCode links work.
All you have to do is, add /go/ before the custom text you want to type for the cloaked link (refer the image below)
So, when you do this to all your links you created using Go Codes will work when you uninstall GoCodes plugin.
Conclusion
I would recommend you to go with Easy Affiliate Links, even if you just want an alternative to GoCodes and use a plugin that gets updated in a timely manner, and also has a simple functionality of categorizing the affiliate links.
You can opt for Pretty Links Lite as it offers the tracking feature as well. There is a pro version of Pretty Links which you can get for $37 and get more features like Detailed Tracking, Split testing, keyword replacing etc.
One thing I dislike about Pretty Link Lite is that it tried to upsell their other products inside the backend which is not very pleasing to the eye.
You may want to go for the Pro version, which offers more features, which, I think is pretty useful, and also gives a cleaner backend interface, unlike the Lite version.
