Stuffing Affiliate Cookies for Thanksgiving

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I put out a press release today about holiday gift ideas at InstrumentPro.com.

The purpose was three-fold. I wanted to get the name out there and in the minds of people as they were gearing up to buy gifts for the holidays, sell some product, and include a soft sell on the affiliate program.

But there was also an unintended consequence. PRWeb, the service I used to distribute the press release, has the company link I submitted (which was an affiliate link) framed on the press release page.

As far as I know, this is a new feature from them. It also ended up inadvertently stuffing cookies on visitors to the release.

Fortunately, I saw this on the release before it was released live to the world and was able to rectify the issue right away, because the affiliate link used was from the MYAP version of the affiliate program.

There is a feature you can set from the merchant side where an affiliate link for a given affiliate is not tracked if it is clicked after another affiliate. So essentially, if a user had already visited another InstrumentPro affiliate, and then seen this press release, that original affiliate would still get credit for a subsequent sale.

Anyhow, be aware of sites out there that might decide to issue a press release with the intention of unleashing a laundry list of affiliate cookies on all that read their release.