In the long run, affiliate link theft can cost you a lot of money if you are not careful. Link theft can be intentional or accidental, and can be done by other affiliates, customers or in rare cases the vendors themselves.
How Affiliate Link Theft Works: Simple and Advanced Methods
Link theft can be defined as any time someone strips out your affiliate link and replaces it with theirs. The simplest and most common practice is people who sign up directly for the affiliate program, strip out your link and replace it with theirs to get a “discount.” For example, if you are selling a $40 product on ClickBank with a 75 percent commission, the buyer would just replace your link with theirs and pay just $10 for the product.
There are, of course, more mischievous schemes as well. One technique used by other affiliates and unscrupulous publishers is to hide affiliate link codes in a 1×1 iframe. Because credit for affiliate links is usually given to the affiliate who sent the traffic last, that means that if they can get someone to view a page with their 1×1 iframe code on it after you send them traffic, they will get the credit. For example, if a webmaster has an email list, all they need to do is get the customer’s email list, have them read a content page with their affiliate link embedded in it, and they will instantly overwrite your affiliate code.
Now that you know what link theft is, how can you prevent it?
Preventing Affiliate Link Theft
The most basic way of protecting yourself against link theft is to cloak your links. Many merchants will allow you to do this right on their system. If you want, you can also cloak your links yourself. There are a number of free programs on the Internet that will allow you to do this. You can also buy a domain and do a domain-level redirect without showing the destination URL. Unfortunately, anyone seeing the product can still go to the affiliate network to find the product. For example, this person could go to ClickBank, search for the name of the product and find it that way, even if the link is cloaked.
The most drastic way to prevent affiliate theft is to go all the way and write your own sales letter, with different product names and headlines. Then just embed the “buy now” button code in your own website, cloaked. This technique will just about prevent 99 percent of affiliate link fraud.
With the iframing issue, unfortunately, if you are a small publisher, there is little recourse. The one way you can track this kind of link theft is by asking the publisher to place your own tracking pixel on their “Thank You” page. If you are sending more than $500 a month in traffic, they will usually be happy to do this, unless, of course, the thief is the publisher and not another affiliate.
These are a few of the most common ways links are stolen and how to protect against them. Again, link theft can cost you a lot of money over time. Use these techniques to make sure you get paid for your work.
