Affiliate Spam - Users Beware!

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. This resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. 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. Now, merchants need to be very careful because of this.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel, should research the different technological solutions available to them. Now that affiliate marketing has grown, a good number of affiliate merchants now have updated their terms and contracts to safeguard against spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

Spamdexing is the practice of deliberately creating web pages, which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

Since people usually use anti-spam software programs, marketers are debating over the affiliate practice of Spamdexing, and many have change their method from sending spam emails to generating large amounts of automatically generated web pages, with different niche keywords and optimizing their sites through search engines. 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.