The Paid Online Survey Center - Special Reports

Referral Link Fraud

by Anthony Serrano, July 1, 2006

Affiliate websites are ubiquitous these days. Countless webmasters put up referral links in the hopes of cashing in on heavy traffic to their sites. However, the internet browsing-public quickly caught on. When users see affiliate links, they either wonder if the linking company is any good or know for sure that it isn't, leading them to think that the webmaster put the link there just to get a referral bonus. These users proceed to remove the affiliate text from the link (i.e., the "55310" in "www.blahyadablah.com/55310") and sign up as though the affiliate did nothing to refer them to the site. This results in lower profits for the affiliate and a distrustful attitude sown among many users.

If the affiliate link itself is both the pipeline to revenue and the obstacle to revenue, then it ought to be dealt with immediately, the webmasters think. The following are two of the most commonly used tactics for webmasters to conceal their ulterior motives by masking their affiliate status.

URL Encoding - To employ this tactic, the webmaster first encodes his referral link in hexadecimal characters, which any web browser can translate to plain text. The following string of characters, which translates to "http://microsoft.com": http://microsoft.com
After encoding, the webmaster creates a page within his server which, upon following the encrypted link, loads the referrer's "credited" sign-up page (the page you would see upon clicking the referral link un-encrypted) in the main browser window. Since this "fake" sign-up page is on the same server as the website, it appears that the "credited" page is actually part of the webmaster's site and not a referral link. Furthermore, since the referral link is encrypted, anybody who views the HTML source code won't know what it means.
Status Bar Masking - This is quite simple, but not as effective as URL Encoding with the advent of Mozilla Firefox. By using the "onmouseover" command, the webmaster can change the status bar to show an "unaffiliated" link. In IE, this scripting technique works seamlessly, but with Mozilla (a more secure browser to say the least), it falls flat--Mozilla's settings prevent JavaScripts to change status bar text by default. Instead of seeing the "unaffiliated" link in the status bar upon hovering over a link, the user sees nothing. This leads the user to determine where the link goes rather than actually following the link. So, whenever you don't see a URL's destination, check to see if the webmaster employed status bar masking by holding down the left mouse button.

There are more complicated ways for webmasters to mask their affiliate status, such as server-side scripting, but the two listed here are the simplest and most commonly employed. If you find out any other ways to accomplish this task, let me know, and I'll do the same if I discover any other ways.