Types of Affiliate Websites/Challenges and Issues

Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (i.e., advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers:

•Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage).

•Comparison shopping websites and directories.

• •Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back, or charitable donations. •Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions. 

•Content and niche market websites, including product review sites.

• •Personal websites (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.) •Weblogs and website syndication feeds.

• •E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in email lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy. 

•Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website. •Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates. •Cost per action (CPA) networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates.

Publisher Recruitment

Affiliate networks that already have several advertisers typically also have a large pool of publishers. These publishers could be potentially recruited, and there is also an increased chance that publishers in the network apply to the program on their own, without the need for recruitment efforts by the advertiser.

Relevant websites that attract the same target audiences as the advertiser but without competing with it are potential affiliate partners as well. Vendors or existing customers can also become recruits if doing so makes sense and does not violate any laws or regulations.


Almost any website could be recruited as an affiliate publisher, although high-traffic websites are more likely interested in (for their own sake) low-risk CPM or medium-risk CPC deals rather than higher-risk CPA or revenue share deals.

Locating Affiliate Programs

There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programmes for a target website namely:

1. •affiliate programs directories, 
2. large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, and 
3. •the target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled "affiliate program," "affiliates," "referral program," or "webmasters" – usually in the footer or "About" section of the website.) 

If the listed locations do not yield information pertaining to affiliates, it may be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The most definitive method for finding this information is to contact the website owner directly.

Challenges and Issues

Since the emergence of affiliate marketing, there has been little control over affiliate activity. Unscrupulous affiliates have used spam, false advertising, forced clicks (to get tracking cookies set on users' computers), adware, and other methods to drive traffic to their sponsors. Although many affiliate programs have terms of service that contain rules against spam, this marketing method has historically proven to attract abuse from spammers.

 E-mail Spam

In the infancy of affiliate marketing, many Internet users held negative opinions due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing matured, many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Search Engine Spam

As search engines have become more prominent, some affiliate marketers have shifted from sending e-mail spam to creating automatically-generated webpages that often contain product data feeds provided by merchants. The goal of such webpages is to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine – also known as spamdexing. Each page can be targeted to a different niche market through the use of specific keywords, with the result being a skewed form of search engine optimization.

Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines, whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google's PageRank algorithm update ("BigDaddy") in February 2006 – the final stage of Google's major update ("Jagger") that began in mid-summer 2005 – specifically targeted spamdexing with great success. This update thus enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer-generated duplicate content from its index.

Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links are regarded negatively as they do not offer quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates." Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e., moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate


marketer webmasters must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites.

Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself. For instance, if a website contains information pertaining to publishing a website, an affiliate link leading to a merchant's Internet service provider (ISP) within that website's content would be appropriate. If a website contains information pertaining to sports, an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods website may work well within the context of the articles and information about sports. The goal is to publish quality information within the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites.

 Adware

Although it differs from spyware, adware often uses the same methods and technologies. Merchants initially were uninformed about adware, what impact it had, and how it could damage their brands. Affiliate marketers became aware of the issue much more quickly, especially because they noticed that adware often overwrites tracking cookies, thus resulting in a decline of commissions. Affiliates not employing adware felt that it was stealing commission from them. Adware often has no valuable purpose and rarely provides any useful content to the user, who is typically unaware that such software is installed on his/her computer.


Affiliates discussed the issues in Internet forums and began to organize their efforts. They believed that the best way to address the problem was to discourage merchants from advertising via adware. Merchants that were either indifferent to or supportive of adware were exposed by affiliates, thus damaging those merchants' reputations and tarnishing their general affiliate marketing efforts. Many affiliates either terminated the use of such merchants or switched to a competitor's affiliate program. Eventually, affiliate networks were also forced by merchants and affiliates to take a stand and ban certain adware publishers from their network. The result was Code of Conduct by Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics, LinkShare's Anti-Predatory Advertising Addendum and ShareASale’s complete ban of software applications as a medium for affiliates to promote advertiser offers Regardless of the progress made, adware continues to be an issue, as demonstrated by the class action lawsuit against ValueClick and its daughter company Commission Junction filed on April 20, 2007