Dirty tactics of clickbank vendors

I was looking through the clickbank marketplace searching for some services to promote for a new website. I did my searching and found some pretty good choices, so it I thought anyway. There was one website in particular I was checking out. . . I have a bad habit of randomly clicking my mouse while I browse and stumbled onto some hidden links on this clickbank vendors website.

The links were styled to look exactly like the website text, and the first one I found led to an info site with a lot of adsense ads. That was of no consequence, it opened in a new window & didn’t seem like it’d steal my commissions. However, I found another hidden link. This one opened in a new window as well – but it was a redirect to the vendors website (which I was considering promoting) using a clickbank referral link. Meaning – if I were to refer someone to that website and they accidentally clicked on that hidden link, someone else (probably the vendor) would get credit for that affiliate sale.

Maybe it’s not only clickbank vendors – it can probably be done with other affiliate systems as well. I just found that and it really made me mad. Sure, in my infancy of trying to make money online I did a few shady things thinking it’d get me ahead. I never tried to steal money from someone who was working to make me money, though. Most of my “shady tactics” had to do with seo. It’s not like this vendor is new to selling online, I am pretty sure this vendor has been with clickbank for at least a year – probably longer. I’ve promoted them via PPC before but the return wasn’t enough for me to continue with it. Personally, I think that vendors that try to steal commissions from their affiliates should be dropped and blacklisted from affiliate program services for some undetermined amount of time until they figure out that they shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them.