Beware of Affiliate Spamming!
October 5, 2008
Beware of Affiliate Spamming!
The modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business, is a popular method of promoting Internet businesses called, ’affiliate marketing’. Due to there efforts, affiliate marketers will make money for each subscriber, visitor and customer given to an internet business. The affiliate marketer will earn compensation based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.
You can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out emails advertising the products he already promotes and makes money on. SPAM was the result from this, contributing to the deciding factor to the anti-spam laws passed to help prevent it. There is a strict fine to spammers and in addition to this, there is now a penalty for any merchant that is associated with spammers, making them accountable too. So caution is well advised to merchants.
Any merchant that is thinking about including an affiliate strategy to their online sales, would be wise to research the different software programs available to use that will help prevent spamming. As affiliate marketing has matured, many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.
People whose intention is to create web pages that will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the listing of their website, put their page close to the top of the search engine lists or to influence the way they are assigned in a category is called, ’Spamdexing’.
Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages, each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of using the search engine optimize their sites. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. The goal of search engines is to provide the user with high quality search results by them entering in keywords or phrases, and spam is one of the biggest threats to this effort.