How do I control affiliate spammers?
How do I control affiliate spammers?
Some Internet businesses use “affiliate” advertising: they pay a commission to partners who drive traffic to their website, for example. While such programs can be effective, they can also be attractive nuisances for spammers. If the spamming remains uncontrolled, such programs may have their IPs listed in SBL as spam support services (SMTP, HTTP, DNS). Here are some ideas for keeping spammers away from your affiliate program:
– Verify each affiliate’s real identity and check that they don’t have a spammy history before they are allowed in the program.
– Delay commission payments for 30 to 60 days and/or require paid-in-advance forfeitable damage deposit.
– Have a strong Acceptable Use Policy which prohibits spam and terminate promptly for spam with no payment nor refund of deposit. (see http://www.spamhaus.org/isp/ )
– Maintain your role accounts and feedback loops and process them daily.
– Register affiliate sending IPs, domains and the domains they will use for URLs, and update www.abuse.net to report those domains to you (and the domain’s ISP).
– Monitor webserver logs for unusual traffic bursts from particular affiliates.
– Monitor “referer” headers in webserver logs for unusual traffic bursts from unexpected sources.
– Don’t accept HTTP referals from domains in domain blocklists, nor from IPs in SBL or XBL.
– Be suspicious of freshly registered domains and don’t allow anonymized whois or bogus registration info among your affiliates’ domains.
– Point URLs for terminated affiliates’ accounts to a “404” or similar non-promotional page which shows that you do terminate them and that you aren’t trying to drum up traffic via disposable spam accounts.
Back