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Beware of Cookies

15 April 2007

John Chow

You may know about Cookies on your web browser. It gives identification to your browser and its useful for authenticating, tracking and maintaining specific information about you. Once you visit a website it deliver a small package of data to your computer, and stay in your hard disk until expired or get deleted

Cookies itself is not harmful but it could be used for abusive purpose, for instance in affiliate marketing. Normally an affiliate link (like several links in this page) will deliver you to the reseller site with certain affiliate ID only when you click on the link. If you not decided to buy on the reseller site right away, the affiliate ID still remain on your computer as a cookie. When you revisiting the reseller site several days later and buy something from that place, those cookies will be used as reference and the owner will receive credit of it.

But recently I read article from John Chow about abusing cookies. Its a bad suggestion and considered as cheating by many major affiliate program. Those trick works by putting affiliate links inside an iframe code. Since it loads every time you visit the page automatically, its like forcing an affiliate cookie down someone’s throat. Many affiliate program will banned the website owner immediately if they noticed those cheat trick.

You can avoid those trick either by rejecting cookies or deleting cookies after your browsing session. This behavior is not only reducing fraud on Internet marketing, but also increasing your data security since cookies can be used by trojan or virus to steal your personal data or gain access to your email. Therefore it always good practice to clear up your browser cache and cookies before you close your web browser.

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3 Responses to ' Beware of Cookies '

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  1. andi eko said,

    on April 16th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    I rare erase my cookies but i agree about trojan viruses can steal our data. From now on i try to erase my cookies periodically. Thxs

  2. K said,

    on May 1st, 2007 at 3:44 am

    I hate john chow dot Com.

  3. Aaron Cook said,

    on May 5th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    John gives out a lot of bad advice in my opinion…advice that can get his readers’ banned from their affiliate programs. That’s a shame. But just as bad is that his readers are totally clueless about it.

    Shoemoney (shoemoney.com) also commented on John’s post/bad advice by saying, “We have already kicked out people for doing this. Its very easy to detect. You might want to point that out to your readers also.”

    And, “Cookie stuffing or “force clicking” is nothing new and it falls in line with fraud and theft.”

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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