If you don’t know what cookie stuffing is, it is probably in your best interest to read this article and forget you ever heard the term. Often, new online marketers hear this term as an easy way to make money through affiliates and start looking for ways to do it. Before I tell you why it is so wrong, let me explain what it is.
Cookie Stuffing is when an affiliate uses a script or include on one website to put a cookie (website information) on a visitor’s computer for another unrelated site. The idea is that, by putting an affiliate cookie on all their visitors’ computers, if someone eventually lands on the buy page of the affiliate offer, they will get the commission from the purchase. Oftentimes, this approach results in the original affiliate losing out on a sale that they may have spent good time marketing. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say that a marketer works on a page to accurately describe a new product coming to market. He has tested it, likes it, and then puts together a sales page to entice his visitors to go view the page. Well, we all know that most people will do a little research before buying so after the visitor goes to the page and gets the legitimate cookie, he goes to Google and does a search for “product name + review”. Now, he ends up on a review site that has a bunch of garbage reviews and stuffs 10’s or even 100’s of affiliate cookies on the visitor’s computer.
After doing his homework, the visitor ends up back on the sale site (or even another website with a different product) and the website that stuffed cookies gets the affiliate commission, even though that website did not even refer him to the site.
The reason cookie stuffing is blackhat, is because the site that stuffed the cookies on the computer did nothing more than broadcast cookies hoping that he eventually landed on one of the sales pages and bought. He did nothing to create goodwill on behalf of the buyer, yet he is rewarded. In fact, I recall a few internet marketers a few years back that were super ebay affiliates and were facing up to 20 years for fraud because of some of what they were doing with this technique, although I am unsure of what the outcome of that case was.
At the end of the day, just remember that if you see something in your email box or someone trying to sell you cookie stuffing software or scripts – not only should you say no, you should immediately remove yourself from that mailing list because the person emailing you is either very stupid or very unethical, both of which you want no part of.