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Reverse engineering affiliate traffic – Part I

September 6, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) Leave a Comment

Reverse Engineering Affiliate Traffic – Part I:

I’m going to go through what I know about reverse engineering affiliate traffic. I’m always learning new tricks and techniques in this area, so comment away with your own ideas.

Product to Analyze for Affiliate Traffic

I’m going to use The Rich Janitor product because it seems to be extremely popular right now with an overall Alexa ranking of under 10,000 and U.S. Traffic rank of 4,473:

Rich Janitor Alexa

Rich Janitor Alexa

Just so we’re clear, I am NOT recommending The Rich Janitor product. In fact I found NUMEROUS red-flags on it’s sales page as you can see in the video below:

However, because the Rich Janitor product has remained popular for a decent amount of time and because I’ve already had some experience researching the product I’ve picked it as the subject of these posts.

Techniques for Identifying Affiliate Traffic

I’m somewhat “organizing on the fly” so, I’ll add to this section as needed. I’ll approach from two different angles:

  • Identifying affiliates in order to locate traffic they are sending.
  • Identifying traffic in order to locate affiliates

Obviously there’s an interplay between those two angles and each one feeds the other.

Click Here to Go to Part IIa: Reverse engineering affiliate traffic – informal reconnaisonce.

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Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

A short history of Adwords shenanigans

September 4, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) Leave a Comment

I have a video from TODAY showing these Adwords shenanigans that I’ve included. Included ones from over the past month, including one particularly nefarious advertiser.

Let me start with a very basic Adwords blackhat trick that affected me personally at one time, because someone used many of MY domains to do it. The thing that stinks is that while legitimate advertisers are getting shut off, these black hat Adwords shenanigans continue unabated.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Advertiser X finds a high quality domain for a keyword or set of keywords they want to target. Let’s call that domain QualityDomain.com. The real destination URL they want to send people to is of poor quality. I’ll call that BadDomain.com Here’s the set up:
    • Display URL – QualityDomain.com (the advertiser typically does NOT own this domain)
    • Destination URL – Quality Domain.com
  2. Advertiser X runs their ad to QualityDomain.com for a certain length of time (I don’t know how they determine how long) and uses QualityDomain.com as the display URL. The set up is till:
    • Display URL – QualityDomain.com
    • Destination URL – QualityDomain.com
  3. Advertiser X then keeps the display URL as QualityDomain.com but starts rotating the destination URL. Now the set up looks like this:
    • Display URL – QualityDomain.com
    • Destination URL – Rotates between QualityDomain.com and BadDomain.com
  4. Advertiser X stops rotating the destination URL between QualityDomain.com and BadDomain.com and always sends people to BadDomain.com. Now the set up looks like this:
    • Display URL – QualityDomain.com
    • Destination URL – BadDomain.com
  5. Adwords Account gets shut down. I’m not sure on this one as I haven’t looked into it…I would imagine that they have worked out how to keep getting new accounts.

Example from Today – 9/3/2010:

Example of nefarious NewsDaily7.com hijacking Bizymoms.com domain on Adwords:

NewsDaily7.com advertised through multiple Adwords Accounts:

Note: to get an idea of how nefarious the company behind the NewsDaily7.com site is, click here to download a preliminary diagram of connections between their websites which also includes an old Microsoft Support domain they now control – and for which they have successfully injected false IP information into Microsoft’s DNS records).

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Filed Under: Blog, Competitive Intelligence

FTC Seeks Public Comment on a Planned Consumer Fraud Survey

September 3, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) Leave a Comment

FTC 8/31/2010 News Release:

Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a planned survey on the prevalence of consumer fraud in the United States. The survey is a follow-up to two previous surveys conducted in 2003 and 2005, that are reported in “Consumer Fraud in the United States: An FTC Survey,” and “Consumer Fraud in the United States: The Second FTC Survey.”  The second survey showed that 30.2 million adults – 13.5 percent of the adult population – were victims of fraud during the year studied.

As outlined in a Federal Register Notice, the FTC proposes to survey a nationwide randomly-selected sample of consumers ages 18 and over. The survey would be conducted by telephone and participation would be voluntary. The results will assist the FTC in determining the incidence of consumer fraud, and whether the type and frequency of consumer fraud is changing. This information will inform the FTC about how best to combat consumer fraud.

Federal law requires that government agencies obtain Office of Management and Budget approval to collect information from the public, and requires agencies to seek public comment before seeking approval. Comments will be accepted for 60 days, until November 1, 2010.

Copies of the Federal Register Notice are available from the FTC’s websithttp://www.workathometruth.com/blog/wp-admin/post-new.phpe at http://www.ftc.gov and from the FTC’s Consumer Response Center, Room 130, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20580. Call toll-free: 1-877-FTC-HELP.

Original FTC release

Filed Under: FTC Releases
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