Have your affiliates hijacked your brand in Yahoo?

Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Affiliate Marketing | Posted on 25-03-2009

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Every so often even I have to admit to the genius, and down right evilness, of some affiliate marketing technniques. And this one has really got me in awe of the guys who do it – they should get a gold medal for the concept and a smack in the head for implementing it. Using some Yahoo! technology you too can hijack the brand listings of a merchant and make sure that every time someone searches for their brand and clicks the natural result it counts as an affiliate click and as a result an affiliate sale.

How to Hijack the results!

This is not meant as a tutorial but is how someone is doing it. Basically you go to Yahoo! and get them to put you in touch with one of the agencies who work with them on Yahoo! Search Submit.

Quick Note – Yahoo! Search Submit lets you pay a premium for each click you get for certain terms in natural search and ‘improve the relevance’ of the Yahoo! results by submitting a keyword spam alternative version of pages within your site. So your site gets ranked on links still – and the new spammy content not the nice user friendly content that you sell your products with. 

Anyway if you’re an affiliate you pay the couple of pennies a click redirect the merchants brand traffic that they already were getting in Yahoo!, through your affiliate URL, and get them to pay you for the priveledge. It’s almost undetectable (I said almost but there is a way). 

Why this is wrong

From my point of view this should be excluded as an affiliate technique in the terms and conditions of every single affiliate program. Becuause:

 

  1. Double counting of sales: The sale is likely to be attributed to SEO and Affiliates costing merchants unnecessary sums.
  2. The merchant was going to get the sale anyway: if a brands website doesn’t rank for brand terms in Yahoo! they should be sacking their SEO agency not rewarding affiliates.
  3. Higher Commissions = Higher Rip Offs: The people doing this are making loads of sales – and as a result they get higher commissions distorting a merchants impression of their affiliate marketing. Merchants should reward those who work hard not those who cheat.
As you can tell I am not a great fan of this technique so duly in my next post I’ll show you how to find out if your affiliates are hijacking your brand in Google.
If you have a website you’d like me to have a look at let me know in the comments below.

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