Obviously this post was written back in ‘07, so a couple of years on a lot of these methods are now outdated.

Some still work to a certain degree, while others are completely dead – depending on the affiliate network or tracking systems in place.

You might be surprised, there are STILL some large networks here in the UK with pretty unsophisticated systems in place.

I might update this at somepoint and discuss some of the newer techniques out there.

But obviously, the best methods are always kept quiet. :-)

Very nice post but with all due respect, these are old tricks and none of them work against a mature monitoring system (however, practically *all* of them will work against an affiliate manager who is naive enough to believe they can police their affiliates manually.)

We’ve been doing this for about five years, so I like to believe I know a thing or two. We’ve spent millions rolling out a global network in over 20 countries. Our network consists of servers located in many major metropolitan ares and it focuses solely on collecting search engine advertisements.

Keeping that in mind, here’s a point-by-point response to the techniques in your post.

1. Dayparting – doesn’t work because an automated monitoring solution is looking 24 hours a day.

2 & 3. Geotargeting and IP blocking – this WILL work against a small-time system. Our network consists of tens of thousands of nodes. Affiliates have no way of blocking them, short of suppressing ad serving to major cities (which also has the side effect of eliminating most of their traffic.)

4. Advert tricks (“hijacking”) – We are so far beyond that it’s not funny: http://www.adgooroo.com/features/trademark_hijacking_report.php

5 & 6. Masking affiliate URLs and Domain redirects – amateur hour. Every last bidder who tries this WILL be busted. It’s trivial to analyze URLs and quickly narrow these down.

7. Broad match tricks (and misspellings) – if this works, it’s strictly the fault of the affiliate manager. It’s a simple matter to monitor a few hundred variations of a brand name with an automated system.

I’d be happy to arrange for some free service so you can see our systems in action for yourself (email me). Here’s the URL for you to check out in the meantime:

http://www.adgooroo.com/products/trademark_monitoring.php

We’ve seen these techniques and more. Most amusing are the affiliates that use slight variations in trademarks to bypass the filters. For example, they’ll use “M acys” in their ad text to evade the filter for “Macys”.

Our solution, PoachMark, is designed to counter all of these techniques. We monitor search ads from different locations at different times of the day. We follow redirects and conduct limited crawls of affiliate sites.

Anyway, you can learn more here:
http://brandverity.com/poachmark/