Warning: Please consider the repercussions of using this sort of thing, it is considered bad practice and unbecoming of a respectable affiliate marketer.

You may be familiar with cookie stuffing already, but this cookie stuffing technique is far more effective than tagging a bunch of your own websites with your cookie, or even (shudder) infecting others’ web space with your links. Using images to stuff cookies (and rake in the commissions) is being used across the web by the black hat professionals, but there are many layers of complexity to remaining “safe” when you are employing these types of practices, so remember, this is a proof of concept! You could be banned from the sites cookie stuffed images are posted on, as well as the affiliate programs these images were crafted to con.

Well, on to it then, shall we?

It’s really quite simple, all that is required is a web server with php installed and mod_rewrite enabled so you can use a .htaccess file to cloak your image, which is really a script that redirects them to your affiliate link.

Create an .htaccess file with these contents:

<Files imagename.jpg>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

You can change imagename.jpg to whatever you want to call your image, it doesn’t really matter. After you’ve created this file, create a text file with the following contents, and then save it as the file name you chose in the .htaccess file.

<?
if(!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’]){
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
} else {
header("Location: http://www.yourpartner.com/a31dks3Zqc3x");
}
?>

When the “image” is loaded from a website, the headers and cookies from the affiliate link will be processed by the user who is currently browsing that website. If for some reason somebody investigates and directly visits the image, it will display a 404 error instead of redirecting them to your affiliate link, which adds some sort of security to this mechanism.

I was so involved in writing up 5 SEO No-No’s on Friday that I completely forgot I was supposed to shoot you guys a blog related comic. (Really sorry folks!) So, to make up for it, I present…

Beware The Dark Side

Cheers!

Some of these might seem they have been drug out and beaten many times, but you still see sites employing these methods, scattered across the internet.

Do not stuff the same keyword / keyword phrase into every header tag!
You will not pass search engine spider inspection, and your website will appear dull and boring to actual readers who might actually have an interest in your site.

Do not cram your title with tons of keywords!
Your title should be quick and to the point, and optionally include your site name at the end. It’s there to inform both visitors AND spiders of exactly what the page is about.

Do not bold the same keyword over and over and over!
Using bold to emphasize points you are trying to make is great, and can help visually direct a user along your idea’s path of progression. However, if used and abused, it can quickly turn the same visitor away.

Do not stuff keywords into the alt attributes of your images!
This is another SEO No-No! Alt attributes should accurately describe the image that it is describing. Nothing more, nothing less. Make sense?

Do not stuff keywords into anything, period!
It’s easily picked up on by search engine spiders, as we’ve all learned one way or another, and it can just as easily repel potential readers or customers.

Capiche?

Alot of large, linkstrong websites have scripts in their software suites that are used to redirect to another portion of their site. Fortunately, on some of them, the coders forget to limit the redirect to local pages only, or some are just used to link to external sites which means they are already primed for this use.

Anyway, check it out:

http://myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=cms.go&_u=http://www.google.com/
http://myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=cms.go&_u=http://www.google.com/

Using hex, you can get around some of the filters MySpace puts up to block unwanted websites (alot of proxy websites will get blacklisted by MySpace, etc.).

Here’s another one:

http://dect.myspace.com/event.ng/Type=Click&Redirect=http://www.google.com
http://dect.myspace.com/event.ng/Type=Click&Redirect=http://www.google.com