A few weeks ago, I had a chance to talk about the issue of cookie stuffing and dos and don’ts of it on Aff ABC. I did mention that I found cookie stuffing to be OK if you had a site dedicated to a product and you were putting cookies for that product only visitors’ computers. That’s what I would call gray hat affiliate marketing at best. If you are taking time to create a site dedicated to product ‘X”, and you are sending PPC and SEO traffic to the site, it would be unfair to not get commission due to the merchant’s incompetence in tracking your orders. Not a lot of my former colleagues approve of this, but If I were an affiliate manager, I would have no problem with that.

What I had an issue with was mass cookie stuffing, in which affiliates stuff the visitor’s computers with all kinds of cookies for products that they are not even promoting. Now that is wrong, and it is illegal. But the new practice seems to be creating a thin page with nothing of value on it, and then using PPC services such as Adwords to drive traffic to it only to put cookie on the visitors’ computers. I believe this approach is even worst than the one I discussed on Aff ABC. At the end of the day, not only you are putting unauthorized cookies on people’s PCs, you are also intentionally driving them to that page with no goal of promoting the product – just to make quick cash. Now that’s like pushing people into a bank and then rubbing them.

Cookie stuffing is a practice that should be acceptable under the circumstances that I mentioned above. The goal in that scenario is not to make more money but to get credit for all the hard work that you put in as an affiliate. However, if you are using cookie stuffing to just make a quick buck and have no plan on actually promoting products, then you should be banned, and in most cases you will. But a lot of Black Hats don’t care about that, now do they?