Please read our program agreement below. The following compliance restrictions are in effect and prohibited:
a. Direct linking a.k.a. URL hijacking. If we are both advertising in the same places—the same keywords on Google, Yahoo or Bing—you need to prohibit direct linking to our website. Links in ads from affiliates should point to their landing pages, not ours.
b. Competitive brand bidding. Prohibit competitive brand bidding (affiliates bidding on our competitors’ trademarked terms)
c. Media & keyword restrictions. Prohibit your affiliates from directly competing with us on specific media properties and keywords. The list of restricted terms should include brand names, typos of brand names and variations that include ‘.com’ or typos of that. You may also want to include top performing keywords and/or brand phrases—phrases that contain your brand along with a generic word.
d. Negative keywords. Require that those same terms be negatively matched to prevent the search engine(s) from accidentally auto-matching your affiliate’s ad to a restricted keyword.
e. Rank restrictions. If you do allow your affiliates to advertise on your brand name or top performing keywords on paid search, you may want to enforce rank restrictions on those specific terms so that your ads appear higher up in result listings than the affiliates’ ads.
f. Domain registration. You should prohibit affiliates from registering domains that contain your brand and typos of your brand.
g. Link cloaking. Link cloaking can be used for good or for evasion purposes. If you have the technical know-how, you may consider providing your affiliates with a link cloaking tool so that you can easily decode the affiliate network and ID from cloaked links while still enabling your affiliates to cloak. The restriction needed in your affiliate agreement is to prohibit link cloaking if done through an unauthorized method or if done for the purpose of evading you.
h. Compliance with search engine rules. You should require that your affiliates follow the editorial guidelines of each search engine. For example, the landing page must match the display URL, and no redirects or jump pages that immediately redirect to your website.
i. Prohibit evasion. You should prohibit your affiliates from using evasion tactics to hide the affiliate link when the visits are from either you or from search engine editorial bots checking on paid ads.
j. Violation of laws, rules and regulations. Etc: If you allow email marketing, then you must require compliance with the “can spam” act. Your affiliates who operate editorial publications must also comply with new rules from the FTC when they are endorsing or recommending your products which require disclosure that the website is a compensated affiliate.
Ad copy and landing page copy. You need to prohibit things like:
Use of your brand in ad copy text or in the display URL if you are prohibiting brand use False advertising or any claim that shows you or your competitors in a false or misleading light
Promoting old invalid offers that have expired
Using certain words such as “official” or “free”
k. Press releases. Prohibiting press releases.
l. Fraudulent commissions. You will also want to prohibit fraudulent activities like cookie stuffing, link interception and falsifying orders.
