24/01: Affiliate Link Cloaking, Internet Explorer and Parasite Software

My last post gave a detailed look at some link cloaking software for affiliate marketers and having written it, I thought I ought to expand a little more on the whole issue of link cloaking and the menace of parasite software.

Parasite software is a program installed on a user's computer that can do some very underhand things. Basically, if the software recognizes an affiliate link, it can insert its own cookie in replace of yours, effectively stealing your commissions from right under your nose and neither you, or your visitor/referral will know a thing about it.

That is pretty serious and perhaps far more of a real threat than someone manually altering or stripping out your affiliate link. The problem is, that even if you use redirects, such parasite software can still do its dirty work.

I am currently evaluating some software that claims to overcome this problem using a whole new way of cloaking links.

The other thing I wanted to mention is Internet Explorer. I've never been a fan of this browser; it gives webmasters more headaches than any other browser out there - it messes up the appearance of websites and I recently discovered, by chance, that if you redirect a link using a frame, which is a very common way of handling affiliate links, IE will potentially block cookies, (supposedly ony third party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy) robbing you of your referrals and commissions! This sucks big time as the vast majority of internet users who don't know any better still use this crappy piece of software because it came installed on their computer.

Having said that, Clickbank and CJ links should be OK.....however, when testing in IE8, results are inconclusive - some cookies were set when using a frame and some were not. Why? I have no solid explanation but whatever, if you are using frames to cloak your links, it would pay you to check them in various browsers to ensure your cookie is being set correctly.

If you are using masked frames to redirect your links, go and check them in IE now. Once your page loads, look in the bottom of your browser for a small eye shaped icon - if it's there, double click it and you will probably see that your affiliate cookie has been completely stripped out. If it has, you may need to change all those masked frame links to a simple PHP redirect - the least secure redirect there is, just so that IE users will be credited as your affiliate referrals. Alternatively, try the stealth cloaking option in Samurai Stealth which seems to solve the issue most of the time

Can you imagine how many sales you may have lost because of Microsoft and their decision to implement such a feature in their browser? When I found out I was more than a little mad - thanks a bunch Microsoft for screwing affiliates the world over.

The problem of parasite software is made even worse when using simple PHP redirects because your cookie does not get processed until your visitor actually lands on the page - the parasite does its work before this happens meaning you have no chance whatsoever!! 

Now, the product I am currently evaluating claims to have all the answers to these problems but I'm not ready to share it yet because in early tests, I'm not convinced and IE8 still seems to be blocking cookies on my redirects, whether HTML or PHP. Having said that, the testing process is a bit of a complicated one and I'm hoping that after some dialogue with the program owner, these difficulties can be resolved. If or when they are, I will publish my findings here.

In the meantime, the best advice for all affiliates would be not to use masked frames as a form of redirect, certsinly not without ntesting them fully in the major browsers,  and to check all your existing framed links and redirects very carefully, in particular in Internet Explorer, because you could be cutting your own throat and losing commissions as a result of trying to do the exact opposite! Thanks Microsoft.

TCH