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Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

shamrin.posterous.com

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Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#101

Post by webwright »

patio11 wrote: post #100
a4agarwal wrote: post #77

Hey guys, Posterous partnered with Viglink.com back in December as an experiment to see if we could generate revenue by adding an affiliate code to links that don't already have one. We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all. 1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way 2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possi…

Sachin, if I were hypothetically your in-house SEO, and I read this post at 3 AM in the morning, I would call you on your cell phone and wake you up. The potential for business-level risk terrifies me. My guess is that you get a huge portion of your traffic from Google. Google needs the Internet's link graph to work. Dynamically retargeting links would be a catastrophe for Google if it caught on. It is possible that…

I'd probably be willing to roll the dice. VigLink has investment from Google Ventures (Google's in-house investment arm), First Round, etc.

Peculiar, eh? I agree that Google should be miffed about such things.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#102

Post by patio11 »

jamesbritt wrote: post #58
jon_dahl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. What's wrong with a business having a revenue model? Better this than advertising or a crippled free version.

The problem for me is that visitors to my site may think that I'm the one who is using this affiliate code, and that I'm looking to make a buck off my links. Is that a problem? Depends; some readers are put off by this sort of thing. Witness the comments on HN when someone discovers an affiliate link in a article posted here. You can dismiss this as a fairly benign way to increase revenue, but I'd prefer no one alter…

Well, apparently these are fairly hard to discover if they can do it sitewide for millions of people and not have it seen for four months. This suggests an obvious opportunity for folks who want to promote their affiliate links on HN: clean links in HTML, dynamically retarget to affiliate link via Javascript. Nobody will see it. (Particularly for merchants who 301 their affiliate links to the standard pages -- you'd have to be watching your HTTP headers very carefully to see that.)

Seriously, the possibilities for abuse of this are endless. Which is why the Powers That Be are going to come down on it like a ton of bricks.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#103

Post by kylecordes »

It is on days like that, that I am happy that my blog and company sites are hosted on normal web hosting. I can run whatever blog or CMS I like, whatever versions I like, whatever ads I like (none), whatever affiliates I like (none), and never worry that an otherwise slick platform starts rewriting my links, adding ads, or whatever.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#105

Post by henryw »

jazzychad wrote: post #90
a4agarwal wrote: post #77

Hey guys, Posterous partnered with Viglink.com back in December as an experiment to see if we could generate revenue by adding an affiliate code to links that don't already have one. We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all. 1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way 2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possi…

Re: 4) Links are changed if you copy them. I went to the linked article, right-clicked the "Google" link and clicked "Copy URL". I went to gedit and pasted this: http://api.viglink.com/api/click?key=8eb8c964d427e97a1567cec6532655f0&v=1&libId=1272676171565&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fshamrin.posterous.com%2Fposterous-silently-changes-all-external-links&out=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&txt=Google&title=Posterous%20silently%20ch…

worked fine in chrome under windows 7. i got http://www.google.com/

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#106

Post by mbreese »

patio11 wrote: post #100
a4agarwal wrote: post #77

Hey guys, Posterous partnered with Viglink.com back in December as an experiment to see if we could generate revenue by adding an affiliate code to links that don't already have one. We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all. 1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way 2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possi…

Sachin, if I were hypothetically your in-house SEO, and I read this post at 3 AM in the morning, I would call you on your cell phone and wake you up. The potential for business-level risk terrifies me. My guess is that you get a huge portion of your traffic from Google. Google needs the Internet's link graph to work. Dynamically retargeting links would be a catastrophe for Google if it caught on. It is possible that…

Since the changes are made using Javascript, would Google even notice? Meaning, wouldn't their link graph be unaffected? I doubt they run each page through javascriot when indexing (then again, this is Google).

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#107

Post by pak »

ajg1977 wrote: post #83
a4agarwal wrote: post #77

Hey guys, Posterous partnered with Viglink.com back in December as an experiment to see if we could generate revenue by adding an affiliate code to links that don't already have one. We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all. 1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way 2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possi…

I'm curious as to whether you considered if this would have any effect on PageRank for content you host? This type of behavior - using javascript to present the user with links different than the googlebot found - seems like the type of thing they frown on.

Unless googlebot runs a javascript engine, I don't think it will ever be able to find out... unless a human over there reads this and adds this information to their PageRank database.

Google does this themselves for their search engine pages, in a way... if you have JavaScript running, there is an onmousedown pingback added for every link in the search results so they know what you click on. The link itself remains apparently unaffected. Check it out if you have Firebug/Web Inspector, each link has e.g. onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','','012394AFC')".

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#108

Post by mahmud »

pak wrote: post #107
ajg1977 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to whether you considered if this would have any effect on PageRank for content you host? This type of behavior - using javascript to present the user with links different than the googlebot found - seems like the type of thing they frown on.

Unless googlebot runs a javascript engine, I don't think it will ever be able to find out... unless a human over there reads this and adds this information to their PageRank database. Google does this themselves for their search engine pages, in a way... if you have JavaScript running, there is an onmousedown pingback added for every link in the search results so they know what you click on. The link itself remains a…

Google does execute javascript, and even some flash, but not on all its crawlers (which is very understandable; building a DOM for every page on the web is expensive, even for Google. I say "build a DOM" because abstract interpretation is still far off, specially for the web and its cruft of languages, standards and quirks.)

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/new-reality-google-follows-links-i...

http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/googlebot-executes-jav...

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#109

Post by mahmud »

webwright wrote: post #101
patio11 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sachin, if I were hypothetically your in-house SEO, and I read this post at 3 AM in the morning, I would call you on your cell phone and wake you up. The potential for business-level risk terrifies me. My guess is that you get a huge portion of your traffic from Google. Google needs the Internet's link graph to work. Dynamically retargeting links would be a catastrophe for Google if it caught on. It is possible that…

I'd probably be willing to roll the dice. VigLink has investment from Google Ventures (Google's in-house investment arm), First Round, etc. Peculiar, eh? I agree that Google should be miffed about such things.

They really thought this through. I was wondering why they didn't implement the "technology" in-house, without having to split their ramen with VigLink, but it looks like a well played position.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#110

Post by mahmud »

mbreese wrote: post #106
patio11 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sachin, if I were hypothetically your in-house SEO, and I read this post at 3 AM in the morning, I would call you on your cell phone and wake you up. The potential for business-level risk terrifies me. My guess is that you get a huge portion of your traffic from Google. Google needs the Internet's link graph to work. Dynamically retargeting links would be a catastrophe for Google if it caught on. It is possible that…

Since the changes are made using Javascript, would Google even notice? Meaning, wouldn't their link graph be unaffected? I doubt they run each page through javascriot when indexing (then again, this is Google).

Google does execute javascript: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310061
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