Ok Guys while I was gone Nicolas wrote with the following update. I am very sorry for the delay in posting it:
CAC Issue
Letter from “Dominique”, sent on June 29th reminding us about the email Mark from CAC sent us on June 14th. Two websites were mentioned in that email which we started to deal with on March 14th (we sent the affiliate a warning to cease this activity immediately). Upon receiving the other complaint (June 29th, from “Dominique”) we immediately blocked and suspended the affiliate’s account .
“Misbehaving Affiliates”
On June 29th “Kevin” reported a list of 15 sites that were scraping his website. These websites actually belong to an affiliate of an affiliate of some of our partners (search engines). We replied to “Kevin” on June 30th trying to get further clarification the issue. This is a complex issue which we are trying to solve as soon as possible, but since we are dealing with a partner of a partner of a partner, the communication process will take some time. (Please see our remark regarding this issue at the bottom.)
iGAMI List
Brian sent us a list of 390 URLs on June 29th which we checked. A little more then half (54%) had links to 888 sites from our partners/affiliates. The results of this investigation resulted in:
Blocking 81 affiliate accounts, as well as stopping all due payments.
Sending warning letters to 127 URLs asking them to take down the sites and desist from scraping.
Sending a letter clarifying our new policy to one of our affiliates that owns two URLs although there was no proven scraping activity on them.
Investigating one URL that belongs to a partner of one of our partners. Investigation still in process.
Indexspamming
“Elgoog” informed us on June 30th that http://2–go.com/c/888-com-affiliate.html was just indexed. This is not a site of any of our affiliates.
“greek39” Questions
“greek39” sent us a few questions on July 6th. These questions relate to:
A Parked domain
Whether 888.com software is an adware,
The reasons that an affiliate that was blocked still advertise us on the page,
A long list of 888.com sites that does not compile with Google’s guidelines.
We have replied to all his questions except the 4th one on July 8th, and re-sent it on July 16th. Regarding question No. 4 we have asked “Greek39” to specify what the misbehavior in those sites is.
Spam Report
Dominique sent us another email on the July 16th pointing out Spamdexing done on Google. Again this is a partner “of a third degree” down the line, and I guess that this is a good time to talk a bit about this issue since it also came up in “Kevin” and iGAMI’s complaints.
We have no problem implementing our policies regarding ethical marketing behavior on our partners. This take little time and is done according to straightforward procedures (first warning letter than blocking), but it is a clear process. The problem comes when the Spamdexing is done by one of the partners, of one of the partners, of our partner. Clearly we cannot accuse our direct partner that he uses unethical techniques or assume that he is even aware of it. What we do is communicate, by email and phone, to our direct partner and continuously push them to solve the issue. This obviously takes time and requires additional follow up.
Complaint Procedure
Some of the complaint e-mails we are receiving contain nothing but a URL, while some others contain explanations and specific information. To be able to effectively take care of complaints we need the e-mails to detail for each website what the complaint is about. These explanations and information really help us focus on solving the issue, instead of trying to understand where lays the problem. We would appreciate if CAP members will try to be as specific and accurate as possible on the emails they send us, providing all information that is relevant. For example:
· In scraping matters – which site was scraped
· In blog spamming matters – the specific URL and screenshot of the blog spamming
· In Spamdexing – the specific search term and the spamming sites etc
We look forward to continuing this process with you and your members. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need any additional information.