I had a fun video chat with Jamie Birch of JEB Commerce a few weeks back. We touch on a number of the challenges facing affiliate managers and discuss the details associated with the CSS History Hack and referrer laundering.
Recent Posts
We've seen Google testing a number of different display elements in AdWords over the last few weeks.
Recently we've seen affiliates exploit a hole common to web browsers to evade detection from affiliate managers. The hack is known as the CSS History Hack and it exposes information about what sites you visited before. Affiliates use this technique to determine if a web visitor is an affiliate manager (or network representative), and then hide their affiliate ID if the user is an affiliate manager.
We've introduced several new features over the past few months into PoachMark and felt we were overdue for an update:
As expected, the European Court of Justice ruled today that Google is not liable for search ads purchased by competitors on search ads.
On Tuesday, US Federal authorities filed criminal charges against Christopher Kennedy, a developer of cookie stuffing software. While the developer claims to have never engaged in cookie stuffing for his own benefit, he is being charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. These charges carry a maximum fine of $250K and 5 years in prison.
I'll be speaking at Affiliate Summit West on the Monday 2 PM Panel: Affiliate Program Compliance: Working with the Networks. My co-panelists include Rachel Corcoran, Director of Compliance at Hydra, Graham MacRobie, CEO of Alias Encore and Jamie Birch, CEO of JEBCommerce.
Marc Bitanga recently created a flowchart for Google's Adwords Trademark policy. Although the flowchart doesn't address affiliates, shopping engines, etc. it does do a great job of visualizing many of the common trademark complaint cases.
