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The Truth About Affiliate Link Theft

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing Management by Dan @ 1:41 pm

Affiliate link theft is a topic that has acquired some scathingly depressing reports recently. If you were to believe all of the stories then you would be hard pressed to even entertain the idea of ever including an affiliate link on your site without using numerous software applications to protect your affiliate payments from being stolen by unscrupulous others.

While affiliate link theft does exist, it's not as big a problem as you might expect. With that said, it does pay to exercise a little caution by cloaking the affiliate part of a link. For those sites that have PHP functionality the process is a simple and almost indistinguishable one that will make a link appear as though it leads to a page on your site.

The majority of reports that can be found online “exposing” the major link theft problem are those very same services that offer affiliate links to products that resolve the issue. Surprisingly, in a lot of cases, those links are open and as prone to theft as any links out there showing the true dangers involved.

Let's be honest, though, a single affiliate payment being stolen is one too many and because the process of protecting your payments is such an easy one it would be foolhardy to ignore the process completely. For the vast majority of websites, though, there is little or no reason to implement anything more than a simple redirect – once a potential buyer has clicked through and is on the affiliate site, cookies should protect your commission in most cases and by that stage there is little you can do to prevent the loss of a commission.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 1:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

Responses to “The Truth About Affiliate Link Theft”

  1. Isabella Says:

    Affiliate link theft has been a major problem for affiliate marketers. When a potential customer clicks on your links, it is obvious to them that you have an affiliate link. If the person you are selling to have an affiliate account, all they have to do is to put in there affiliate details and they get credit for the sale, meanwhile you get nothing.

  2. Ethan Says:

    Theft of affiliate links is huge. Many internet affiliates will either steal your affiliate links or by-pass them completely. The big issue is how to overcome this problem. This is where affiliates lose heaps of valuable income. There are loads of affiliate croakers on the market. They word to a certain extent but they don’t completely hide your affiliate details.

  3. Nicholas Says:

    Painful theft of your hand earned commission is now a reality that a lot of affiliates have to face. I have been a victim of affiliate link theft too myself recently and took steps to protect myself. After all, it’s your pocket when you have gone to the lengths of setting up website, buying domains and making landing pages. Affiliate link theft will ultimately lead to leaving your wallet open.

  4. Anthony Says:

    Affiliate marketers are facing problem of theft every single day. If you are using software then just imagine, you go to your favorite website and you want to support them by doing your regular online shopping through their affiliate link, but this time you have a spyware, adware or malware in your computer that will replace the affiliate ID for others.

  5. Jordan Says:

    There are terrible rumors flooding over the internet about affiliates being robbed of hard-earned commissions. I believe this may occur on some minor frequency. Truth is that the bearer of a affiliate link theft can be usually found to be thoughtfully including a link to a product that they claim will eliminate the theft problem completely. The web has billions of potential customers. These are the potential buyers from your website.

  6. Cornelius Knowles Says:

    9sh22hzeql5w5h2u

  7. lakisha snowden Says:

    i want to become an affilate. How would I ptrotect mysef from theives? 3-2-09

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