One would think that it is common sense to have a separate section prohibiting parasitic affiliate behaviors in your affiliate program and your program agreement. However, even larger online merchants sometimes do not do so. First of all, this makes them significantly more vulnerable to rogue affiliates. Secondly, it makes it harder to fight such behaviors. After all, if it hasn’t been prohibited in the first place, how do you enforce it?

Earlier today all Walmart’s affiliates have received a notification of an update to Walmart.com’s Affiliate Terms & Conditions. The core of the message read:

You May NOT:

• employ, use or place any web browser add-ons, toolbars or pop-ups on your website.
• engage in any direct or indirect relationships with ISPs and/or mobile carriers that results in the delivery or act of address bar keyword and URL error trafficking (e.g., a user mistypes a web address in the ISP’s address bar or search bar, and, as a result, is redirected to a web page that contains a Qualifying Link that directs the user to sites like Walmart.com).
• without the prior written approval of Walmart.com, use any Trademark, or any Licensed Material in an advertisement that is not created or provided by Walmart.com in any way that might suggest or imply or mislead or is likely to mislead a visitor to your website into believing that Walmart.com, Wal-Mart Stores or any related entity was the creator or sponsor of such advertisement.
• employ, use, or receive any direct or indirect benefit from, any “cookie stuffing” methods (e.g., use of “cookie stuffing” to cause LinkShare’s tracking systems to conclude that a user has clicked through a Qualifying Link — and to pay commissions accordingly — even if the user has not actually clicked through any such link).

Way to go, Wal-Mart! I believe that every merchant should mimic Walmart.com in prohibiting the above-quoted activities. Do you prohibit these in your affiliate program agreement already?

Related articles of mine (the comments under them are quite informative too):

• Toolbars in Affiliate Marketing
• Adware Affiliate Interferes with Other Channels (video)
• Toolbars, Pop-ups & Parasites in Affiliate Marketing
• What is Cookie Stuffing?
• Since When Has Typosquatting Become Acceptable?

Whether you’re looking to safeguard your brand from typosquatters, or to use misspellings in your search engine optimization, tools to figure out the most common misspellings of your domain name make life easier.

However, good tools are seldomly free, and neither many of this particular type are available for in-browser use. There are a few good ones you will be asked to download and pay for, but today I’d like to share with you 3 online tools that are completely free. I was happy to find them, and think many of us can use them:

1) Keyword Typo Generator from SelfSEO.com [webpage]

Generates keywords and/or domains with wrong key typos, missed character misspellings, typos based on transposition errors (e.g.: “ehllo” instead of “hello”), and double character typos. Here are their typo suggestions for keyword “Travelocity”:

2) Spelling Typo Generator from SEOBook.com [webpage]

SEOBook’s tool offers can search for typos with skipped letter, double letters, reverse letters, skipped spaces, missed keys, and/or inserted keys. We’ve searched it for reverse letter typos of “Priceline” and received the following results:

3) Revoew.com [website]

This service shows some 20 common misspellings for each domain name, and while misspelled domains is not exactly their main focus, this is a very good tool to incorporate in your research too. For example, their analysis/review of Expedia.com looks as follows (common misspellings of domain name circled):

Naturally, the first two tools can be also effectively used to generate mistyped keywords for PPC campaigns.

Have I missed any other good free online tools that exist out there?

Definitions first: lawyer Kelly M. Slavitt, in her Protecting Your Intellectual Property from Domain Name Typosquatters article, wrote:

Cybersquatters register domain names based on a company’s trademarks and then attempt to extort payment from the actual trademark owner in exchange for returning use of the domain name…

Typosquatters are a variation on cybersquatters, but the motive of both is the same: to profit by trading off of the goodwill of intellectual property assets established by rightful owners.

Typosquatters register intentionally misspelled domain name variations of the actual company’s trademark. The typosquatter profits by directing traffic away from the actual Web site to the typosquatter’s rogue site.

Affiliate program manages and online advertisers in general are overwhelmingly against the use of trademarked names in affiliate/publisher’s domains. The same stance is being taken against typosquatters as well.

Now, let’s take this one step further, and look at company (an affiliate/publisher with some of the major European and U.S. affiliate networks) that cashes in on mistyped domains in a different way. I am referring to Barefruit:

Barefruit has partnered with major Internet service providers and portals to develop a system whereby mistyped domain names do not land nowhere, but the end user sees a page with sponsored listings instead. The revenue (which frequently stems from an affiliate marketing relationship) is thereafter split between Barefruit and its partners.

Isn’t this just another form of affiliate marketing parasitism as my friend Donk has pointed out here? It certainly does look like one to me.

Wikipedia’s article on Barefruit quotes some interesting statistics:

Network Solutions has indicated in the past error traffic makes up up to 20% of total network traffic and of that NXD (i.e. Non Existent Domain) errors make up as much as 15% in addition Google recently indicated that 404 HTTP errors alone account for 6.96% of published pages on average of the 11.5 billion web pages currently on the web. These huge volumes has stimulated significant interest in monetising this “lost” traffic.

The fact that there is a market for it, does not mean that it’s okay. There are huge markets for trademark bidding, downloadable toolbars, comprehensive coupon aggregation (even at the expense of theft of exclusive affiliate-specific coupons), etc. But this neither makes these practices ethical, nor valuable for the industry. The essence of Barefruit’s approach is really no different from that of a typosquatter.

Obviously, there is another take on all of this, as nearly every major UK-based affiliate network works with Barefruit. Am I missing something (apart from the financial component, of course)?

Related Articles & Discussions:

• Anyone Heard of Barefruit? (discussion)  <– a must read
• Is Barefruit Good for the Internet?
• Google Profits From Typo Squatting, Report Charges
• Is This Typosquatting? (discussion)
• ISP Network Analyzing Tactics
• Comcast Starts Typosquatting Domain Names