Spamming is like robbing a bank
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The trouble with most get rich quick schemes is either that they don’t work or that they do work but are illegal. The fastest way to get a lot of money is to rob a bank. It’s also a good way to get yourself shot.
Here in our world of affiliate marketing the quickest way to get rich is to force your affiliate cookie on all and sundry and the fastest way to do that is to spam as many people as possible. Spam is everywhere. It must work, people must get rich doing it otherwise it would have stopped by now. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world. So why doesn’t anyone ever get hauled in front of a judge for it?
Over this weekend I’ve happened upon several spammed product feeds in Google’s product search (formerly known as Froogle). They’re just product feeds from major merchants (John Lewis for example) with the product URLs cloaked by bouncing through a redirect on a server in China. This is spamming pure and simple. It adds nothing to the product search, adds no value for the merchant yet makes a tidy profit for the spammer. It’s against Google’s terms and conditions and it’s against the affiliate networks terms and conditions. Yet people still do it. And why? Because it’s an easy way to get rich quick and no one is going to shoot you for it.
What penalties are likely to be imposed on these spammers that they can’t soon find a way around? Google can delete their product feed, ban their IP, block their email address from signing up again but any of these things can be easily defeated by the spammers. The affiliate networks can cancel their accounts but the spammers can sign up again with different details. What’s to stop the spammers? And equally why should legitimate affiliates be prevented from using such tactics if they think they can get away with it too?
As far as Google goes I would have thought they were perfectly capable of detecting these shady redirects in their product search. After all, they seem to have managed to clamp down on such practices in their standard web search. But what can merchants and affiliate networks do about it? I’m sure they have their methods for detecting spammers but my question is whether the window of opportunity is wide enough to make it worth the risk for the spammers. Can the affiliate networks catch the spammers before they can pocket their commission? If not, it’s a lucrative earner with no real work and no real risk.
Of course, wherever there’s an opportunity to make money there’s an opportunity for corruption. Wherever there is communication there is spam. But it’s incredibly frustrating to see other people getting away with it when you yourself are trying to play by the rules. On a related note, I’ve just done a Google search for “free bets” and there are Adwords ads showing up despite the fact that Google don’t allow gambling ads. Surely a company worth over $160b which is famous for it’s algorithms can find a way automatically to enforce their own rules on their own products…
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