Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 1:30 pm Post subject: Possible solution to norton trashing your links
Hi everyone,
I just uploaded my first affiliate marketing site and was appalled to see the mess Norton Internet Security (a program I previously rated very highly) makes of your CJ links.
The discussion here seems to be tending towards redirects etc - I have tried them all and my belief is that nothing will work. For example, you can stop norton removing your links from your page by encoding the URL in Hex format. However, you still hit the problem that norton just blocks anything coming from the qkserv.com domain, which is where CJ's links are tracked from, so you can fool norton on the way out, but you'll never get any qkserv.com content back to the browser no matter how devious you try to get. There is absolutely nothing you can do to fix this as far as I am aware, and I've spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out a way round.
However, I have a solution that I believe will work, and am willing to share it with others if we can get a constructive dialog going to cover all the bases. From what I gather, norton uses the hosts file on your computer to store blocked domains. So I'm proposing writing a small executable which rips all the CJ-related entries out of the file (and any others that are relevant to legitimate affiliate marketing). This is, programatically, a piece of cake and you could then offer such an executable as a download from your site, if you can get your visitors to trust your content. Norton will then hopefully not block your affiliate links.
There are probably a few issues to be ironed out and I'm inviting input from others here -
a) Would a norton liveupdate reinstate these changes? If so, the executable would need to be run regularly, which isn't so good.
b) Are there any other ways in which norton blocks affiliate links other than through the hosts text file? I don't care about popup blockers etc, as that is really a matter for the user, but I strongly believe that re-writing my carefully crafted web code is criminal (if not a breach of copyright), and I fully intend to post a solution to this post haste. I can't believe this has been trundling on for so long now without anybody taking any direct action to get round it.
I would love to hear other people's opinions - if you have experience of exactly what norton is doing etc, please contribute. I'll be happy to share any solutions I come up with.
Dave, go to my site Debtsteps.com to the specific page finance.html and scroll all the way down below the footer links. With Norton's running, tell me if you see any links there, you should see 1 out of 4 I am testing. On the one, click it and see if it goes to the merchant.
I have been working on this issue for a while now, including devouring everything I can find about it online. I even installed the free trial Norton's on one computer, and a parasiteware on another so I can cross-test.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 1:52 pm Post subject: will do
Debs,
will try it when I get home from work, we don't have norton here at work. I'll be home in about 3 hours, so will post back to you then.
I honestly believe that if it's a simple case of removing stuff from the hosts file on your computer, then a simple fix is only a week or so away, if I can sit down for a few hours and write a small exe. let's hope its not any more complicated than that. Hopefully there will be some people out there reading this that know exactly what norton does. There's always a way to hack things into working.........
Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 4:06 pm Post subject: some info from CJ
I've noticed a lot of people on various forums CJ bashing - saying that they will not give out information regarding this problem, and that they won't respond to enquiries.
Well, I have to say that I have no real experience of CJ as I only recently signed up, but I sent a support request through their interface asking about this problem and what CJ were doing about it. They responded in less than a day - they say that the technology to fix this is being developed as we speak, with estimated implementation late 2004. Make of that what you will.... it's a long time to wait, but making a major change to the backbone processing system of a site the size of CJ would be less than trivial so this sounds reasonable to me.
As a software developer on large data processing systems, I would estimate 2 or 3 months just to get a thing like that through acceptance testing (including all the minor bugfixes that inevitably throws up) once all coding has been finalised and unit tested (probably a few months development in that too), so maybe they're on the case after all. In the meantime, I'm going to try and sort out a hack to get round the problem that my site visitors can use. Who's interested in helping out with some investigative work?
Dave, I knew CJ was working on a solution, last I heard implementation was supposed to be this Spring, so it's nice to see newer info.
The biggest problem I have with any executable is the potential for abuse. particularly by the code being messed with by unscrupulous webmasters.
I am thinking the interference with commerce angle via the FTC might be the way to go. If enough people complained, I think Norton's would be hard-pressed not to change the default to "off."
Obviously if people opt to have it off that is their choice. I would still like to see the webmasters have the ability to deny access to their site if the "Opt Off" visitors come a calling. While they can opt not to view our ads, we should be able to opt to not permit them to view our content.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 7:49 am Post subject: I agree
Debs,
I thought of that also. You would need to be able to determine whether your content is viewable or not programatically, which may be tricky. I guess one way would be to use an <IFRAME> tag to include a piece of CJ-related content. You could then make the contents of the frame invisible and / or 1 pixel high, and check via JavaScript whether or not the code is as you expect. It would depend on whether or not javascript is also messed up by norton - if not, you could at least hard code the HTML into a javascript function which could then be compared to the frame contents using the innerHTML property of an HTML element in javascript. Just a thought.....
I did some more investigation into norton last night, and I discovered that the version I am running does not use the hosts file at all - a scan of my entire hard drive came up with no files containing the text qksrv.net, and the hosts file only contains an entry for localhost, which my local Apache installation uses I guess. I can see qkserv.net in the advanced blocking options of norton so it must be stored somewhere!
I figured out what you need to do in both norton and IE to get content and cookies from CJ accepted (and still have ad blocking on for other sites), but it was quite a tedious process and I would not want to ask my site visitors to go through it.
I will do more investigation but in the meantime I've decided not to post any CJ links on my site, it really messes things up. Linkshare and BeFree still appear to be ok as far as I can tell.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Kewl, maybe BeFree worked with Norton to allow it. I wish CJ would
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2004 2:09 pm Post subject: Link Cloaking
Regarding the idea of affiliate link cloaking - this stops Norton from removing the links from your page, but does not help in actually getting to your qksrv link. You can easily encode your links for free (just look up the hex codes on the net) - this at least means your pages are not full of invisible links with descriptions that don't appear to belong to anything.
However, Norton will not let anything in from qksrv, so as far as I am aware there is no solution as yet. CJ say there will be a solution around towards the end of this year. Long time to wait....
Actually certain types of redirects work to bypass Nortons, one is the Tracker Library redirect used by SBI. I've tested it, it sets the cookie, and you get thru qksrv and to the merchant.
Unfortunately, when you use redirects like this, you open your site to adware invasion so there is no "perfect solution." There is a related active thread called "Norton 2004" that has more info you will find interesting.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
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