Protecting Your Hoplinks
Posted by Greg Lems, Director of Application Development
Remember the good old days, when you could put a personal check in an envelope and leave it in your mailbox with the little red flag up? Nowadays the media is full of reports about identity theft rings, some of which collect bank account information by harvesting checks from mailboxes. Although incidents of this nature have increased in recent years, the overall chances of it happening are actually still quite low. Nevertheless, I won’t leave an outgoing check in my mailbox, because it can’t hurt to be extra safe.
In a somewhat similar manner, it is important for ClickBank publishers and affiliates to protect their Hoplink information. Hoplinks are the key to the ClickBank Marketplace. Affiliates create them to promote publisher products, and publishers rely on them to drive traffic their way.
ClickBank has put a tremendous amount of effort into the reliability and security of its Hoplink system. It is closely monitored and designed to provide every protection possible, so that affiliates get proper credit for their sales. At its heart, however, the Hoplink system relies on URLs to work and as a result information can be exposed about the affiliate for the sale. Luckily there is a way to avoid such exposure.
“Hoplink theft” is a term used to describe the act of changing Hoplinks so that they credit a different affiliate. A hardworking affiliate may place Hoplinks across many sites on the Internet, but a person with their own ClickBank account and bad intentions could, with some manual steps and scheming, create an identical Hoplink to the hardworking affiliate, but with their own nickname substituted in. This typically happens in one of two places: when a Hoplink is placed in an ad by an affiliate, or at payment time when a publisher attempts a quick hop to a different affiliate just before payment. It isn’t a common problem, and when we encounter it we swiftly discipline the dishonest parties. There are steps, however, that can be taken to prevent it from happening in the first place.
To avoid the first form of Hoplink theft, we recommend cloaking your Hoplinks. This involves the creation of redirects that will take users to the intended destination without showing them the exact URL they are being sent to. This can be done either with a bit of HTML that surrounds the Hoplink, or with some server-side scripts for redirects. More information is available on this topic here:
http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_tools.html#Affiliate_Tools_2
Additionally, there are 3rd party products available to cloak Hoplinks. Although ClickBank does not specifically endorse any of these products, we encourage anyone seeking cloaking functionality to investigate what’s out there and available, as there are a number of different ways to perform this simple redirect.
To avoid the second form of Hoplink theft, we recommend that you examine the order flow of the products you are promoting to ensure that additional Hoplinks have not been added to the ordering process. The most straightforward way to do this is to click your own Hoplink, view the publisher’s pitch page and then click through to the ClickBank order form. At the bottom of the order form you’ll see an indicator that starts with “affiliate=.” If your Hoplink was constructed correctly, your affiliate nickname will appear there. It is a good practice to regularly check this flow to ensure you receive proper credit for sales.
Hoplink theft is not common. If you suspect it is happening, you can report it to abuse@clickbank.com and our security team will investigate. By cloaking your Hoplink URL and paying attention to the order flow of products you promote, you can ensure protection of your hard-earned ClickBank commission. Just like when mailing a check, the likelihood of something undesirable happening is low, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe.
Caleb said,
June 18, 2008 @ 11:26 am
I figured out to check the bottom of the actual sales page to see if my id is present for every product I promote after noticing some affiluiate programs I joined would “drop” my link throughout their ordering process. I believe this is one of the main reasons why many affiliates are gettint their commissions stolen and don’t realize it.
Jack said,
June 23, 2008 @ 11:13 am
Shall I use Tinyurl.com to cloak my hop link?
Cameron said,
June 25, 2008 @ 12:27 am
Caleb,
Just keep checking your links after a couple hundred hits mate cause i have had the same problem,some will stay there for a couple hundred hits and some will stay there for a thousand hits then when i go back to the purchase page the Affiliate= None.
I am waiting on a further response to an email i have sent.
It in my case is not getting stolen but rather like you said “just” dropping off.(keep that in mind to Jack.
Raylene said,
June 26, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
I was given a website which promotes 3 products separately. I checked out the first product as far as the purchase and the affiliate had my name. But I noticed after much traffic with Yahoo that the other 2 products did not have my affiliate name. Therefore I do not know if I had sales or not and if I did have sales they didn’t come to my affiliate. Be careful, you do not get told.
Richard said,
June 30, 2008 @ 12:40 am
I once tried using a program called affiliate cloner. I set up my links and after a few weeks I followed one of the the links and scrolled down to the bottom of the Clickbank order page. To my surprise the referring affiliate nick name was changed to “JAVA9″ So I closed the page and followed the link again, this time it showed my affiliate ID at the bottom of the CB order page. I did this over the next few days and found that it was alternating between my CD ID and one called “JAVA9″. I said to myself “that’s funny” since the affiliate cloner works by generating a javascript code from your affiliate hop link for you to save and an html file on your domain and then use IT as your referral link to customers. Then for customer to get to the publisher site they must have javascript enables browser (about 96% of browsers are javascript enabled) When my cloned link is followed it this manner there is a split second where i could actually see the script run. I wasn’t sure what is going on so i stopped using the script.
Clickbank does a fantastic job; I predict that they will be doing more to prevent commission theft.
Richard
Hopeful said,
July 10, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
I was promoting my affiliate links on traffic exchanges (which I have yet to make money) and after a while, my link would have someone else’s name on it.
I personally use http://www.hotshorturl.com
Take Care!
Steve1776 said,
August 25, 2008 @ 7:04 am
I use domain name forwarding with the domains I have registered at 1and1.com.
I use “frame redirect” which will not show you hoplink. Since domain names are cheap and if you buy them from 1and1 they will forward them for free I have some I’m not using yet.