Archive for April 14th, 2009

Beware Of Affiliate Spamming!

Affiliate Spam – Users Beware!

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.

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. This resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. Spammers are severely fined and the newest twist in the anti-spam laws are, that the merchants with affiliates spam are being held responsible for the spamming as well. 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. 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.

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.

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