affiliate link theft

is all the hype true

[Duke Johnson]

I'm a rookie who has busted his!@#%$ to build a couple of sites and get them online. I have now been spending my time trying to learn what I can do to make things better. I have tried a few different approaches with cpc and learned some exspensive lessons. I was doing some research and got to reading a lot about link theft and that to make it work you should buy a cloaker. is this true? how do I know if someones got a hand in my pocket?
or is this hype just to drive a market for cloaking services. I figure I will either get some good advice here or I just ran out in front of a pack of wolfs with a bullseye on me. cheers

[ConfusedWriter]

In honesty, I think this is less prevelant than most people think. This kind of news is scary and it can seem bigger and more widespread than it really is.

Take this with a grain of salt, but I think those that are really raking in the affiliate dollars should be the ones concered, rather than the new guys to the game. For someone who makes thousands of dollars a month doing this, a problem like this could mean some serious money lost. For us little guys, worrying about losing a buck or two, here and there, is probably not worth the time of implementing some confusing systems in order to resolve it.

This is just my opinion of course.

[hunderdown]

You're talking about link hijacking? Where some sleazeware installed on someone's computer hijack's your affiliate link and gets credit?

From what I've read, this is generally less of a problem than it used to be, though it varies with the program. It's the larger ones that get targeted. It also varies depending on how aggressively the merchant goes after the slime. Amazon seems pretty clean, for example.

[Marcia]

If you mean parasitic applications, many, many merchants are signed up with them voluntarily. If someone's got something installed on their machine, something can pop on them as soon as they hit the merchant's site, regardless.

It's a growing problem, hence a lot of people use a mixture of affiliate links and Adsense (with Adsense you always get paid, fair & square), giving one or the other prominence on pages depending on whether or not there are any "clean" merchants to be found in the particular niche.