Last week, Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at the Stanford Institute for Internet and Society, released a blog post reporting that Epic Marketplace, a major US advertising network and member of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), is history stealing via the CSS history hack. This declaration has instigated an ongoing conversation in the internet security and advertising worlds about the ethics and legality surrounding these tactics, especially once users have opted-out or activated Do Not Track. We find this discussion particularly interesting as we’ve seen these methods used by the blackhat affiliates that we monitor on a daily basis.

Part of the agenda of an affiliate hijacker is to always stay one step ahead of merchants by continuously exploiting new methods of hiding fraudulent ads and avoiding detection. Here at BrandVerity, our goal is to stay one step ahead of them, providing increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and management to our clients.

In the last week, Google removed approximately 11,000,000 websites from their organic search results: all websites with co.cc domains. This decision on the part of Google to remove all websites with that domain name has received a fair amount of press from news outlets like the SF Chronicle and the Register, as well as much discussion by Google users on the Google Help Forums. More specifically, Oliver Fisher on the Google Online Security Blog and Matt Cutts on Google+ have commented upon the excessive amount of malware, spam, and low-quality sites housed on bulk subdomain providers like co.cc as reasons for the removal of these sites. Their posts can be found here and here along with user comments discussing the decision.

We’re always looking for new ways to make monitoring and contacting affiliates easier and more efficient, so we’re pleased to announce several new updates to PoachMark that do exactly that.

One of the challenges for affiliate managers is recognizing when an affiliate account has changed hands. This will usually accompany a change in tactics and usually for the worse. The same can be said for new accounts or newly active accounts.

We're currently experiencing issues with our website as a result of the ongoing problems with Amazon's EC2 hosting service.

The European Court of Justice's (ECJ) provided an opinion last week that Marks & Spencer(M&S) violated Interflora's trademark rights by purchasing (but not using) search keywords that contained Interflora's marks.

If there was any lingering doubt over Microsoft's ambitions, their latest adCenter announcement makes it clear they're aiming right at AdWords. Note that, at least for now, adCenter's Quality Score doesn't actually effect where ads appear in search results (unlike AdWords scoring, which dictates placement and CPC), it will simply give advertisers a better idea of how competitive their ads and landing pages are for certain keywords.

Bing's announced some big changes to their paid search advertising policy that will allow the use of trademarks in ad text and as keywords for triggering ads, closely mirroring Google's update last year. These new changes go into effect tomorrow (3/3/11), and apply only to ads targeting the US or Canada.

There's a small but significant change being made to AdWords this week you should be aware of.