Check your iframes with Adblock Plus
I was testing a couple of iframes recently and everything worked as expected…
… until I put my tracking URL in the iframe src="" attribute.
The page went completely blank, which wasn’t supposed to happen.
Finding the culprit
I use Firefox as my main Web browser, so I checked the page in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera… and everything was fine.
Anyway — in case you haven’t guessed from this post’s title — the culprit was the Firefox Adblock Plus add-on.
As soon as I disabled Adblock Plus, the iframed page showed up again.
So clearly Adblock Plus doesn’t like some affiliate links.
What links are affected
I’ve only tested a few different affiliate links so far, but Adblock Plus doesn’t like:
Optimise My Site tracking URLs (which is what I was using).
Clickbank affiliate links.
But the good news is, Prosper202 tracking URLs are not affected.
Are you losing money?
According to the Adblock Plus add-on page, it’s been downloaded more than 87 million times… and is downloaded approximately 858,000 times a week.
Which means you could be sending a boatload of prospective customers to a blank page.
And the more tech savvy your customer, more likely they are to be using Firefox and Adblock Plus.
How to get around the problem
One way is to use a PHP redirect, and then use the cloaked URL in the iframe src="" attribute.
If you don’t know how to set up a PHP redirect, then check out Rosalind Gardner’s post How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links the Easy Way.
Just don’t use obvious advertising words like "track" or "ads" in your file, folder, or link names and you should be OK.
