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’. 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. 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.

Any merchant that is thinking about including an affiliate strategy to their online sales, would be wise to research the different software programs available to use that will help prevent spamming. 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. 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.