Affiliate marketing 274
Locating affiliate programs
There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programs for a target website:
1 .Affiliate program directories,
22 ..Large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, and
3 .The target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled "affiliate program",
"affiliates", "referral program", or "webmasters"—usually in the footer or "About" section of the website.)
If the above locations do not yield information pertaining to affiliates, it may be the case that there exists a
non-public affiliate program. Utilizing one of the common website correlation methods may provide clues about the
affiliate network. The most definitive method for finding this information is to contact the website owner directly, if
a contact method can be located.Past and current issues
Since the emergence of affiliate marketing, there has been little control over affiliate activity. Unscrupulous affiliates
have used spam, false advertising, forced clicks (to get tracking cookies set on users' computers), adware, and other
methods to drive traffic to their sponsors. Although many affiliate programs have terms of service that contain rules
against spam, this marketing method has historically proven to attract abuse from spammers.E-mail spam
In the infancy of affiliate marketing, many Internet users held negative opinions due to the tendency of affiliates to
use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled.[22] As affiliate marketing matured, many affiliate
merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.Search engine spam
As search engines have become more prominent, some affiliate marketers have shifted from sending e-mail spam to
creating automatically generated webpages that often contain product data feeds provided by merchants. The goal of
such webpages is to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, also known as
spamdexing. Each page can be targeted to a different niche market through the use of specific keywords, with the
result being a skewed form of search engine optimization.
Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines, whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or
phrases entered by their users. Google's PageRank algorithm update ("BigDaddy") in February 2006—the final stage
of Google's major update ("Jagger") that began in mid-summer 2005—specifically targeted spamdexing with great
success. This update thus enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer-generated duplicate content
from its index.[23]
Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links have previously held a negative reputation for underdelivering quality
content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as "thin
affiliates".[24] Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e.,
moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate marketer webmasters
must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner
farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites.
Some commentators originally suggested that affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained
within the website itself. For instance, if a website contains information pertaining to publishing a website, an
affiliate link leading to a merchant's internet service provider (ISP) within that website's content would be
appropriate. If a website contains information pertaining to sports, an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods
website may work well within the context of the articles and information about sports. The goal in this case is to
publish quality information within the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites.