Affiliate Spam - Users Beware!

Today, there is a relatively new internet business called, ’affiliate marketing’, which is basically a modern practice of paying finders-fees for introducing new clients to a business through the internet. 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.

So, perhaps you can see why an affiliate marketer would be strongly tempted to send out emails that advertised the products he makes money on for promoting. 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.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel, should research the different technological solutions available to them. As affiliate marketing has matured, many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. There are several types of affiliate marketing management resources available, such as: hosted services, standalone software, shopping carts with affiliate features and even affiliate third party 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. Another term for this is sometimes called, 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.

Related Articles