Affiliate Rant!

Rosalind Gardner has a great blog entry about a note she received from an industry insider regarding an affiliate manager sending out a mailing with a hidden link in his HTML. The HTML was for use by his affiliates and included the following link:

Here’s an example of the code:

<a href=”http://baaaad-mr-merchant.com/” style=”text-decoration:
none”>
<font color=”#000000″>working from home on your
computer</font>

(Quoted: Rosalind Gardner’s Affiliate Marketing Blog » Baaaad Mr. Merchant! Via Rosalind Gardner’s Affiliate Marketing Blog.)

Is it possible there is a less sinister reason for something like this? Maybe - the hidden link was obviously engineered but what if the affiliate managers intention was to garner more link credit and higher rankings for the anchor text “working from home on your computer”. The affiliate manager probably doesn’t intend to steal commissions from his affiliates but the result might still be that some of his affiliates get short changed.

If his intention was benign with respect to his affiliates will his ploy be successful. Probably. The search engines understand link cloaking but this is not a link that has been hidden using a pages background color since the text color is black and most page backgrounds are not black. Also, this hidden link will not appear on the same page with dozens or hundreds of other similarly hidden links. So, one link obscured by using the standard text color on a page… I think the search engines will react favorably.

I think this guy is pretty sharp but he potentially loses points for inadvertently stealing affiliate commissions. If he really wants to be successful and have happy and successful affiliates he should insure that his affiliate link tracking system offers credit for all links coming from his affiliate’s sites even if the links don’t contain an affiliate ID.