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Affiliate Abuse Uncovered in 2009

As an affiliate network that takes ethics seriously, AvantLink employees are always on the lookout for rogue affiliates driving traffic in an unethical manor. In many cases these rogue affiliates end up stealing traffic from other legitimate affiliates as well as trumping merchants other marketing campaigns. In an effort to help cleanup the industry and raise awareness on the methods used by unethical affiliates, here are the affiliate abuses that we uncovered and fought against in 2009.

1. Trademark Bidding. Merchant trademark bidding continued to be a major issue in 2009. While we’ve always kept a close eye on analytics to help identify and root out affiliates involved in trademark bidding, our growth has made it more difficult to catch these affiliates as quickly as we used to. To help solve this issue, we launched an in house trademark monitoring tool that helps us identify this activity quickly. This tool is also available to merchants, allowing them to monitor this activity on their own as well.
2. Spamdexing. From Wikipedia: “Spamdexing (also known as search spam or search engine spam) involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.” This technique involves affiliates that use software to auto-generate keyword rich content to game the search engine algorithms. This keyword rich spam content is only shown to the search bots. In most cases you can’t even get to the affiliates page content with a browser. When you click on the search engine result records for these affiliates, instead of bringing the customer to the affiliate website, it just redirects through the networks click URL, setting an affiliate cookie and then lands on a merchant product detail page.
3. Spyware/Toolbar cookie injection. While many people are aware of the big “parasiteware” players, in this case we are talking about random, small affiliates working in concert with toolbar or spyware software providers. This software, usually downloaded as part of a browser toolbar or other software application, injects an affiliate cookie after the customer is already on the merchants website. From our experience you can identify these affiliates by looking for affiliates with no referrer information associated with their traffic stream. Usually, when asked for full disclosure on how these affiliates are driving traffic, these affiliates will claim to be using PPC and hiding their referrer information to protect their keywords. While I do accept the fact that there are legitimate PPC affiliates that hide their referrer information to protect their keywords, if an affiliate is not willing to give you any information that can help you identify legitimate PPC campaigns they are running, this is a major red flag. At the network level, it can be very difficult to get evidence for this type of abuse. We worked with a couple of merchants that were able to provide full click stream reports where we could see obvious examples of network click redirects right in the middle of the customer browsing the merchants website.

AvantLink.com has always done extensive work at the network level to filter out unethical affiliates. This gives merchants in our network a lot more protection by default from this type of activity compared to other networks. Even with our thorough screening process, occasionally an unethical affiliate will figure out a way around the network level screening. As these unethical affiliates continue to adopt new abuse strategies, we will continue to uncover and battle this abuse as quickly as possible.

Scott Kalbach