Hijacking has as many faces as there are people. It is estimated (do not remember the source) that about 30 % of your hard earned affilate commision is stolen by hijackers. It comes in different forms. The most obvious is to replace your tracking code with the hijackers code.
Various affilate providers and merchants protect their affilates in different ways. And there is software out there to protect you or you may use your own technique:
1. Redirection or cloacking. You hide the code by cloacking (redireting to the merchant site).
2. Frames. You may hide the link in a null frame.
3. Writing your own Java Scripts or encrypt the link in more advanced ways.
As sales through affiliates increases, this will become an increasing problem.
Some useful links:
http://www.linkshield.com/
http://www.affiliatelinkcloaker.com/
http://www.affiliatemarketerstoolbox.com/
http://www.clickbankguide.com/
http://tinyurl.com/
http://compacturl.com/cgi-bin/compact?
It is possible to "redirect every link" to hijackers if they are advanced enough and secure sites is not used. A solution may also be to rename the URL by compacting before cloacking.
Note: Some SE's penalizes cloaked sites, so cloacking may reduce your pagerank.
You find more information on this by the following search "link hijacking" +affiliate
or alternativeliy in my link collection
<<link removed by Catalyst - link is in your sig>>
Page search (CTRL + F +
Prevent Affiliate Links hijacking
A related problem is cookies. Some providers use cookies so your referral may be active for months. Myself, I empty cookies and temporary internet files nearly every day. An abvious solution should be to log the referral in a database on the merchant's site and not in a cookie on the surfers Pc. But then it must (?) be identified by the surfers IP address, and that may be dynamic. Is there other solutiones that does not depend on cookies on the surfers PC? What about syndicated minisites?
Kjell Bleivik
http://www.multifinanceit.com/