Two advertisers have confirmed it via email. Lead reporting through Commission Junction has been negatively affected by recent changes.

From LowerMyBills.com:

On Friday our analysts discovered a discrepancy between the leads generated for our Home Equity product and the leads being tracked in CJ.

From Savings.com:

As many of you already know, CJ has been experiencing technical problems post their deployment yesterday. CJ has assured us that they are working to fix the problem as quickly as possible. We understand that many of you cannot see any transaction data within your Savings.com program; unfortunately, this problem is completely out of our hands. Please note, we have been assured by CJ that they will be able to properly credit each of you shortly.

Raise your hand if you’re surprised that there is no mention of this in the Commission Junction Account Manager. Anyone? It seems there is no news or information for CJ to report other than how to use Javascript links.

Today at Revenews, Beth Kirsch outlines Commission Junction’s Link Management Initiative specifically for Affiliate Managers. She is head of the affiliate program for LowerMyBills.com, a highly successful CJ merchant, and has so far reserved judgment on the switch to Javascript as the network’s default link format. In today’s post she asks the critical question of who benefits from LMI, if not the merchants or affiliates?

By not answering the question, the answer is obvious. If you are an affiliate and you don’t like the mandatory infliction of Javascript on your websites, please send Beth’s post to all of the appropriate affiliate program managers.

At its peak, a front page story on Digg will send dozens of visitors per second to your website. Is it ready for the traffic?

Having a link on the front page of Digg.com presents websites with one of the fastest influxes of traffic possible. Similar waves of traffic might come from Slashdot.org or a national media website like HowardStern.com. When the story first hits, you will receive hundreds of uniques per minute, all grabbing the same page. How can you prepare your website to stand up to the crushing wall of visitors? Follow below for a few easy steps that you can take either before or after being ‘Dugg’ to make sure that your site stays online and responds quickly to each page request.

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Since there is no longer an official Commission Junction forum, this post will serve as a central collection point for issues raised by the introduction of LMI and Javascript links. This entry will change as new issues appear so be sure to refresh the page on each visit.

LMI: Things That Will Never Be Fixed

• Users that browse with Javascript disabled. A small percentage of web browsers turn off Javascript and will never see the affiliate links. Instead of a text link on a page, users with Javascript disabled will only see a blank hole. This is neither good for your user experience or conversion rate. Just how many users have Javascript turned off is up for debate and it depends on your website’s audience. There are two major services that publish browser statistics, W3Schools and TheCounter. An average of their results (serving millions of page views) would suggest 8% of your users will never see your affiliate links if you switch to Javascript. (more…)

Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their trouble-laden CPC network, Adsense. The new Google advertising program, called the Content Referral Network, will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action, such as purchasing a product or completing a lead form. This differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click on the ad. Despite their best efforts, this fraud opportunity methodology lead to thousands of webmasters trying to game the system.

It is easy to fake a click. It is much more difficult to fake a sale.

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In response to the 7 billion page spammer, Google PR reps responded that only a fraction of the billions of pages were actually indexed, and that there is a problem with the site: search operator. If the spammer did not have so many pages indexed, how did he achieve an Alexa rank as the 700th most popular site on the web? From where was all that traffic coming, if not Google? (more…)

If there is one lesson to be learned from the recent exposure of the spammy underbelly of large search engines it is that original content is now deemed worthless.

Any attempt to build traffic to your website by publishing unique opinions or interesting reading material is being discouraged; you cannot compete with a computer script that will mangle and re-arrange your content to re-publish it. You also cannot hope to out produce outsourced teams of low-paid ‘writers’ that have no authority to give opinions on anything, but routinely publish (or re-write) drivel that passes for medical and disease information. With some creative linking, the pages appear in search engine results and average users can’t tell whether it is an authority or not. After clicking through, they are often greeted with nothing but a little copied or worthless content and the requisite three blocks of ads. (more…)

Yesterday’s outing of the 7 billion page spammer has generated an enormous amount of interest. Enough interest that a Google PR rep posted on Digg that this was all part of a “bad data push” and that the error wasn’t with the index, but with the site: operator:

Our engineers recently noticed that our site: queries (number of results listed for a search) were showing bizarre results. This has turned out to be tied to a bad data push, and we’re fixing this right now.

Give us a little bit of credit, eh? This was not a bad data push and while the site: command may have been overestimating the amount of pages, you must admit he was well indexed and the pages were ranking. He gamed Google better than anyone has in a long, long time. I’d wager it worked better than he expected or ever hoped. If he had limited each subdomain to a few thousand pages, he probably could’ve flown under the radar indefinitely (and there are many people who do).

This cannot be faked: (more…)

As most SEOs know, MSN loves the subdomains. You can make hundreds of keyworded subdomains and MSN will think quite highly of the pages. Same goes for blogspot and other blogs– they do very well on MSN and sometimes on Yahoo. Now Google and the new BigDaddy crawler is showing an even more idiotic preference when indexing and ranking subdomains.

Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google. And they are ranking, too. That particular domain has an Alexa ranking of under 7,000. Another domain owned by the same person, t1ps2see.com, has between 1.7 and 2.4 billion indexed pages and an Alexa ranking of under 2,000… after 4 weeks. Coincidentally, the sites also have 3 blocks of Adsense ads on each page. I wonder how much that one person is earning per day with billions and billions of pages indexed and ranking? (more…)

Beth Kirsch is the Director of Marketing for a powerhouse CJ advertiser, Lowermybills.com. Today on Revenews, she reveals the dirt on CJ’s Link Management Initiative and how it creates one of the largest user-behaviour monitoring systems on the internet. Once laid out, it is easy to see why ValueClick would want the traffic data of 68% of the people on the internet.

Mind-boggling isn’t it? As CJ affiliates and ValueClick publishers, we manage to reach the long tail of over two thirds of all internet traffiic. What company wouldn’t want to have that influx of data? By switching us all to javascript, they get it for free. Bargain of the century, I’d say– all it costs is a few noisy troublemaking affiliates that don’t want to put in a few hours of work to change link types.