Forum Moderators: skibum
Netsetter just changed their name to marketscore. In their notification mail, they simply state "we are not allowing publishers to promote Marketscore in the search engines." That's a huge catch-all. Unless they mean using your affiliate link as the url on the SERP, which is not specified.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Fingerhut wants you to get listings. From an email - "Start ranking Fingerhut.com categories, and the list of keywords provided, on the many search engines available to you ... We will bump your commission rate up by 2% for one month from the time we receive your email and verify our ranking. ... -Please seamlessly redirect all visitors to Fingerhut.com when ranking the Fingerhut keyword and variations of."
They provide a laundry list of keywords this is approved for. They only bump your % for one month - gee thanks. They initially pay 5%.
Interesting to see merchants get into SEO stuff through affiliates. What concerns me is how some merchants don't like you to rank well under their name. Occasionally, I get pages to rank better than merchants for their own name. I think if I have better SEO abilites than they do, why shouldn't I be able to reap the rewards, as long as I don't infringe on trademarks?
This will get more visitors to their site, where they may repeat the discount claim with a false banner or text link. When the customer arrives at the merchants site, they find no special offer and complain - to the merchant customer service line.
This hogs resources and costs money. This problem arises because 95% of surfers do not know that they arrived via an affiliate and so blame the merchant for false advertising.
To eliminate such problems, merchants often err on the side of caution in their terms and conditions.
Taking this stance, and eliminating opportunity for all affiliates - good or bad, is essentially shooting themselves in the foot. If I get a high ranking page, and they drop my commissions, I would seriously consider doing something else with that traffic.
I completely agree. However, if the affilate system that I have seen is a common example, then I can understand why merchants act that way. This particular system needed much human involvement to validate each payment. If a system is badly designed and makes a lot of work for the manager, then it is easier for him to raise the level, and so reduice his own workload.
I will never understand why some companies use software that still needs humans to do simple repetitive tasks.
