Affiliates are very important to vendors and those vendors need to take steps to assure that their links are not visible to customers browsing their website. A couple of viable precautions are using a redirect link, or a cloaking code. There are also programs which the vendors can purchase that will allow him or her to offer the affiliates security such as Hop Guard. Your business relies heavily upon affiliates channeling buyers to your site and Hop Guard encrypts the affiliate's link so that they can be assured that no one will make off with their commissions. There are cloaking programs available, one such is Affiliate Cloner another is Affiliate Shield. These programs provide you with a way to cloak your link so that your affiliate I.D. does not show. If it can't be seen it can't be changed. Click Mate is a program that focuses on linking all your affiliates to all of your products along with giving you the ability to notify all of your affiliates when you have a new product. Click Mate also helps with tracking and security.

Using products like these will show your affiliates that you are a real professional who is concerned about providing the security they need to be able to do their jobs. Easy to use, the affiliate merely has to enter his link and an encrypted link will be immediately assigned to them. Nothing is 100% foolproof but these are some of the best on the market.

In another scenario, which although unethical isn't technically fraud, a customer of yours, once on the publishers site could simply click an available link and sign up as an affiliate themselves and purchase under his or her own I.D. instead of yours. Some of the things a publisher can do to protect their affiliate's commissions from this kind of dealing would be to find ways to make it less probable that someone will see the links.

They can put the links on a page that is separate from the ordering pages. Make certain that these are pages that a search engine will not try to index. As an example, you could put the links on the FAQ's page. You can also set up pages separate from the ordering areas where the affiliate program is explained and visitors to your site are told that the program is available and they only need to contact you for further information. Another solution would be a separate page that the affiliates link to, which would still have all of your information and the order link, leaving your vendor page intact where you could safely have things like the sign up link for new affiliates since the buyers sent by your affiliates would not end up on that page.