The Truth About Affiliate Link Theft
Posted in Affiliate Marketing by Click Consult on 28th of August, 2008
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.
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.
