Affiliate Marketing Tutorials and Reviews | Cookie Stuffing Primer- Why Cloaking to Prevent Affiliate Theft Should be the Last Thing You Should Worry About

Cookie Stuffing Primer- Why Cloaking to Prevent Affiliate Theft Should be the Last Thing You Should Worry About

**This is a rather long post and is not meant to teach someone how to cookie stuff but rather show you exactly how cookie stuffing happens and why it affects most online marketer’s bottom line. **

Okay, so everywhere you read, there is a growing paranoia in regards to your affiliate link being swiped, right? And there are tons of products online that claim to supposedly help you keep that sale….you know the products…ninja affiliate cloaker, ect… Most white hat affiliates use these cloakers to make it so an average person won’t simply bypass your affiliate link by going directly to the source. But what most don’t realize is that affiliate marketers face a much bigger threat to their affiliate commissions. This, my friends, is keyword stuffing and I will give you a basic overview into how it works and ways that you can protect yourself from this all the while keeping your affiliate link intact WITHOUT having to use a cloaker.

The reason why I even mention this is because a friend of mine who is ranking high for a certain popular affiliate product has been seeing his sales plummet. On inspection, he realized the cause….this was due to another website (which is on the top of google for the keyword as well) stuffing cookies and basically stealing his sales.

Now, not many people talk about this but you can find all sorts of information in the various black hat forums and communities. And yes, they rake in a ton of sales by doing this.

How a Normal ‘White Hat’ Regular Marketer Uses Cookies

First, I am going to explain the usual process that a normal affiliate marketer will go through to get a sale. Let’s say that “Joe Schmo” is selling Alex Goad’s 4 Tier Annihilation Method product. Typically, an affiliate marketer would simply build a page, like a review page, and have a clickable link with his affiliate id in it. He may even cloak his link so that the person would have to jump through hoops to bypass his link (like type in the URL) Now let’s say that “Sally” goes to his page. Nothing good will happen for Joe Schmo until Sally decides that she wants to know more and clicks on Joe’s affiliate link. The only way that Joe would get credited with a sale is if Sally clicked through to his link. That’s it. That is the only way under normal circumstances.

  • Joe Schmo Builds a Review Page with his affiliate link
  • Sally happens by and takes a look at his page
  • Sally leaves (Joe get nada) OR Sally clicks on Joe’s link and a cookie is dropped for a certain amount of time(hours, days or weeks) which will mark Sally as Joe’s sale.

Let’s say Sally decides that she likes the product or wants to check it out for more information. Sally clicks on Joe’s affiliate link. BOOM! A cookie is dropped crediting Joe with the sale if Sally buys the product. Usually a cookie can last for as long as the company want it to. Normally, this is anywhere between 24 hours to 1 month. What this means is that if Sally leaves the sales page and returns to buy it 12 hours later, then the Joe will still get the sale.

The only way to negate this is if Sally decides to delete the cookies from her web browser. And given that most people aren’t that attuned to the internet, this is unlikely to happen.

How to Cookie Stuff in a more Ethical fashion

Now, let’s get into cookie stuffing. But before I really get into this, I want to say that I use “ethical” rather loosely here. Frankly, cookie stuffing could be considered unethical all the way across the board BUT then again, I have reached the decision that Affiliate Marketing on the whole is pretty much an unethical sport (think about it….all advertising is about perception, deception, and diversion).

Let’s pretend for a second that Joe wants to take things a bit further. Let’s suppose that instead of relying on Sally to click his affiliate link, he instead would like to grab her at the door so to speak. In other words, what if he can place a cookie on Sally’s browser window the moment she loads his site? In this scenario, we are going to suppose that Sally came from a google type search and found Joe’s site through organic listings while she was researching the product. She looks at his page and then walks away.

Two days later, Sally has mulled over the product and decided that she wanted to buy it. She goes directly to the website. BAM! Joe’s cookie is still there even though Sally never visited the site and Joe gets credited with the sale.

Alternatively, let’s suppose that Sally visits Joe’s site and decides to continue on with her research and visit the next review down on the organic page…..Steve’s site. On this site, Sally is finally convinced and goes through Steve’s affiliate link. What happens then? Well, because Joe was using session cookies, he won’t get credited with the sale….Steve will. In a nutshell, Steve’s affiliate link will replace Joe’s.

Cookie Stuffing for a Session

  1. Joe Schmo builds either an iframe or a html page with the ability to embed a cookie with his affiliate link.
  2. Sally comes to Joe’s site, doesn’t click on Joe’s affiliate link and moves on. However, Joe’s cookie is embedded in Sally’s browser.
  3. A couple days later, Sally decides she wants to purchase the product and go directly to the sales page and purchases the product.
  4. Joe gets the sale because his cookie is still on Sally’s browser.

So, how does this work? In everyday modern English, when someone opens a page that is primed to cookie stuff, another hidden browser is opened up going directly to the affiliate link. In the mind of the site, the unsuspecting victi…ahem…surfer went to the sales page and a cookie is dropped onto the surfer’s browsing marking someone like Joe as the originator of the sale.

So Sally reaches the Joe’s page, takes a look and passes on the opportunity and moves on. A week later, Sally decides that he wants the product and go direct to purchase the product. Because Joe dropped the cookie, he gets credited with the sale.

So, is this unethical? Personally I don’t think that dropping session cookies is really unethical. After all, if “Sally” goes to another affiliate’s website and uses their affiliate link, then that other affiliate would get credited for the sale. That said, there are some reasons why you may want to cookie stuff this way. For instance:

  • Cookie Stuffing allows you to place a link to the sales page without an affiliate link attached and still get the sale. For instance, let’s say you are doing a review for a product. You could appear less biased if you went direct to the source, right? And most people wouldn’t know that you were adding a link to their browser.
  • This technique also prevents some of the more ‘astute’ internet folks who don’t like to go through affiliate links and simply retype a url to the sales page direct. The cookie is there regardless of how they get to the sales page.

Now somewhere along the line, some blackhat mofo thought to himself, “well, if I can stuff one cookie, why not go ahead and stuff 2,3,4 or 5 cookies onto the site?” And suddenly, we are starting to enter the land of thievery and all other ugly and unethical tactics.

Which leads me back to my friend. In the above example, “Joe” was using session cookies which is sort of a gray area among affiliate networks. Gray because Joe isn’t really making his cookies “stick”. In my friend’s case, anyone who goes through his link after going to a site that stuffs using images will not credit him with a sale. And this is where the thievery begins.

Let’s use Joe as an example again. Let’s suppose that Joe is fairly new to the affiliate marketing business and has been told that with a little SEO, if he gets his link to the front page, he will finally be able to reap the rewards. Joe has done his homework and finally makes it to the front page. In fact, he finds himself just above the fold, at position number three for his site.

He sees that his traffic is good and by all accounts, he should be getting sales. However, a few days pass and he hasn’t made one sale. Now Joe is pissed and decides that making money online is a total sham and just moves on.

What Joe doesn’t realize is that the front page of google for affiliate products is like swimming with sharks. And in this ocean, it is infested with some cookie stuffing mo-fo’s. What he does realize is that sitting right below him is “black hat bad guy”, Alex. Alex’s site is alot like Joe’s. The only difference is that Alex’s site is stuffing cookies using an image as a way to stuff his cookie. What makes this different than a normal session cookie stuff is that the image stuff embeds itself in a way that basically wipes out any other cookie that may come if the surfer visits another site. In other words, Alex’s cookie stays and Alex get credited for the sale EVEN IF THE BUYER GOES TO JOE’S SITE LAST….Even if the buyer goes through Joe’s link. It doesn’t matter. In fact, the only way that the cookie goes away is if:

  • The cookie expires.
  • The surfer deletes his cookies.

Now, if I may present an even worse scenario and something that is currently running rampant….Stuffing Cookies on Forums. Since cookies deal primarily with embedding code into images, any forum that allows images (and that is pretty much all of them) is susceptible to cookie stuffing. Let’s take a look at an example….

Let’s say that Alex doesn’t even have a website. Let’s suppose that instead of working on a website, Alex is a member on a variety of forums. On these forums, he has become an affiliate for some hot products. He does the usual stuff on the forum…post, read, ect. But sitting neatly inside his avatar or sig link, Alex’s picture is hosting several affiliate links and embedding them on every computer that happens to take a gander at them. So when Sally visits this forum and is reading and runs across one of Alex’s posts, guess what happens? You got it. Her browser runs wild with movement and is getting stuffed like a pig with Alex’s cookies.

Later on, Sally does a google search on a product that she happens to have been stuffed with. She finds Joe’s site, likes what she sees and decides to purchase the product. She clicks through Joe’s affiliate link. Only this time, Alex, not Joe, gets the sale. Pretty sick, right?

The good news is most affiliate networks frown on this and will ban a person pretty quickly. However, for one reason or another, clickbank doesn’t. And considering that most newbie affiliate marketers first use clickbank as a starting point for their affiliate journey, you can pretty much guarantee that most are victims of this.

How do these affiliate networks find these guys? Well, most of the time the answer is real obvious. For everytime you stuff a site, it gives an impression. An affiliate network is smart enough to know that if a particular site is sending them traffic but only converting at .00001%, and the average conversion is much higher, then they know that something is amiss and may investigate it. The better Black Hatters have a way around this though (which I won’t get into).

Why do I even bother to go over cookie stuffing with you?

Like I said earlier, I am not here to debate whether cookie stuffing is ethical or not.  I am not one to sit on my high horse defaming someone for doing this as I don’t think ‘ethical’ and ‘marketing’ go together like peas and carrots.  The point to this post is that most online marketers are taught to believe that by simply hiding or cloaking your affiliate link will automatically make you safe from having sales stolen from you.

And this is something that is simply not discussed on make money blogs because the authors either have no idea as to what cookie stuffing is or simply don’t want to divulge the information to the amateur marketer.

But know you know……

Links about cookie stuffing

Auctiva Stuffing EPN Cookies

Right now Auctiva, image hosting and auction software for eBay, is doing what is known as ‘cookie stuffing’. This means that visitors to some Auctiva listings are being embedded with an EPN affiliate cookie without them knowing it or by …

Cookie Stuffing with .htaccess

I recently got the chance to speak on Whiteboard Friday over at SEOmoz, it was a quick session whereby a few SEO’s just give up a couple of tricks that the general population may not be aware of, i chose to talk about cookie stuffing. …

Clickbank Products and Cookie Stuffing

Well, you know you can make a lot of money being an affiliate, but sometimes you need some quick cash for your projects or any other needs, so lets consider I need some quick cash for my children : lol, and I need it fast, …

“Stuffing”: Affiliate Link Spamming

Now, here’s where “cooking stuffing” comes into play. Cookie stuffing is basically “stuffing” a large number of cookies onto a user’s computer without them clicking on anything, so if they decide to buy whatever product in the future, …

Methods used for cookie stuffing

This is a post related to the previous post about ‘what is cookie stuffing’. The most commonly used used methods are: 1. Using Javascript 2. Using iFrames 3. PHP Header redirect 4. .htaccess and redirect pages 5. With HTML Object 6. …

Cloaking Links: Why Bother

To stuff cookies. Cookie stuffing is a trick beyond the scope of this article. If someone tries to sell you cookie stuffing software, run the other way. To mislead people about the destination link. If you are cloaking links to trick …

What Is Cookie Stuffing?

He sent in a question asking for advice on how to implement cookie stuffing with a chosen affiliate program such as Amazon Associates. I do not recommend or support the practice of cookie stuffing. Here is a copy of the email and below …

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Comments

One Response to “Cookie Stuffing Primer- Why Cloaking to Prevent Affiliate Theft Should be the Last Thing You Should Worry About”

  1. Affiliate Internet Marketing on June 18th, 2008 7:14 am

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