Marcia - 4:40 am on Dec 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

Jim, the bottom line is that many affiliates are sick and tired of unscrupulous, greedy merchants trying to rip them off and defraud them any which way they can.

An affiliate relationship is a business arrangement - send targeted customer, customer buys, get paid. Commissioned sales - just like real world sales representatives, an old, old business model that's been working for a long time.

Giving away free SEO benefit is not part of an affiliate contract. In the honest, ethical business arrangement (and contract), affiliate and merchant are "partners" for mutual benefit. In the SERPs they are competitors for placement and traffic.

Added:

Walmart does, in fact, run banners for other (non-competing) companies. Either they're affiliated by business arrangement, or they get paid for running the ads (which don't pass PR, BTW - and is still a "leak" from an affiliate's POV). But you will not find Walmart giving Target or Macy's high PR deep links with anchor text to help their rankings.

As an afterthought, I've seen various writings 'round and about looking for PR and anchor text via affiliate links. From what I've gathered it's generally SEOs looking for an easy linking scheme to raise their clients' linkpop and search engine rankings - on the backs of who they hope are ignorant affiliates - instead of doing a legitimate link development campaign.

If they can't or don't want to do it themselves, they might as well outsource it, because most any affiliate who manages to get decent PR on their site won't be outstmarted and fall for the scheme or for being dceived or "used", and if they think that links from PR0 Supplemental pages from cranked out cookie cutter datafeed sites (who at this point probably don't know better) will help their clients' rankings, then they're in the wrong business.

[edited by: Marcia at 4:55 am (utc) on Dec. 10, 2006]