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. An affiliate marketer is paid for every visitor, subscriber, or customer provided to an Internet business because of his efforts. 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. 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. Now that affiliate marketing has grown, a good number of affiliate merchants now have updated their terms and contracts to safeguard against 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. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. 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.
