I am more surprised that this kind of coupon trickery still pays off and the retailers are burning money on it.<p>The way I see it, you only search for coupons once you see a product at a retailer and you want to buy it (or even once you already have a shopping cart built up, and are on the checkout form where the coupon field is). So the retailer already acquired you as a customer, and you're ready to checkout. Most likely you'll end up checking out anyway even if you don't find any valid coupons (which is what's currently happening, since most coupons don't work anyway).<p>So why are retailers still paying out affiliate revenue in this case? They have the customer already. This shady affiliate doesn't bring them anything they didn't already have.<p>They can easily fix this by only paying out affiliate revenue for actual, legitimate affiliates, those that brought you a brand new customer. If the user already spent time browsing your website and built up a shopping cart, don't pay out affiliate revenue even if they do end up clicking on an affiliate link after.
This is just pointing out a site that's ranking--the title of the post doesn't go with the content of the post. The "how" isn't revealed.<p>Regardless, most likely there are links involved, and there actually be canonical tags involved, as well. If there are links involved they're most likely hiding them from link crawlers like ahrefs and Majestic.com.
While cookie stuffing is nothing new in the wonderful world of Affiliate marketing, leveraging Amazon's force de frappe in this way is actually brilliant.<p>Not that I condone it but the sheer ingenuity can be appreciated.
This concept is called the leeching and ranking. In this, mostly Google Sites & AWS S3 is preferred as a source by the leechers. Mostly used by coupon and movie download sites.<p>Finally, someone has openly spoken about it, instead of exploiting it a bit more!
I'm trying to understand how this works:<p>the s3 page has all links go to promocode.org
<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/in...</a><p>When you click on that you get redirected to promocode.org where you get re-prompted to click on the promo code and that's where the cookie promo gets tacked on the walgreens website.<p>I understand that amazonaws.com is a highly-ranked domain. What part of this process makes this particular s3 webpage rank up in search algorithms though? At the end of the day don't you need lots of _direct_ inbound clicks and links to this specific s3 page for it to rank higher?<p>The only way I see this working is if _indirect_ clicks of the entire domain count towards the ranking of this specific page -- that doesn't seem right though.<p>edit: looks like the paragraph above describes the concept of "domain authority" so that's probably the answer
A bit off topic, but if you wanted to get better savings (aside from coupons), try adding your products to a cart and leaving it alone for 2-3 days. Often, online places will offer you a significant discount by having items in the cart and not checking out. It's their way of getting you back in even if it means selling at break even prices.
I came into this post with a hunch that it would detail some weird social engineering stuff and it did not disappoint. What a weird, interesting world we live in.
Let's decompose what is going on when you click on one of these pages :
For instance : <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/in...</a>
It's a page with fake coupons links<p>When you click the "show coupon" boutton, two things happen<p>1. A javascript "click" event is triggered (in coupon.js) and executes :
window.open(<a href="https://www.promocodefor.org/promo/walgreens/walgreens-photo-coupon/c833699cf9ddea03/enjoy-50-off-enlargements-and-posters/?expanded=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.promocodefor.org/promo/walgreens/walgreens-photo...</a>)
This opens a new tab at this url, this page shows the fake coupon code.<p>2.Since the button is a <a> tag with href="<a href="https://www.promocodefor.org/go/pcfc833699cf9ddea03"" rel="nofollow">https://www.promocodefor.org/go/pcfc833699cf9ddea03"</a>, the current tag navigates to this url<p>Then you follow 7 redirect redirects (code 302) to pages owned by <a href="https://skimlinks.com" rel="nofollow">https://skimlinks.com</a> who redirects to pages owned by <a href="https://www.conversantmedia.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.conversantmedia.com</a> who finally redirect to <a href="https://photo.walgreens.com/store/prints?tab=photo_Promo1" rel="nofollow">https://photo.walgreens.com/store/prints?tab=photo_Promo1</a><p>It's basically an affliate link to walgreens.<p>The question is how did <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/in...</a> rank so high in google ? Just because it's hosted on amazon doesn't make sense. There is a trick that we don't know.<p>I think it's hosted on Amazon S3 juste because it's very cheap hosting, since the site is a single .html file
The coupon thing seems crazy - Walmart must be spending real money to reward sites that actually did not provide a coupon.<p>i mean i know it's all about consumer surplus, but all walmart knows is that someone on the internet wanted to get a discount, did not get it, and now walmart pays random SEO cash. They lose margin, the buyer is frustrated cos they paid full price, and walmart knows nothing about surplus because the client paid full price - no differentiation no price signal.<p>how is walmart winning here?
> Since most of the coupons you find on these pages don’t work, you may have wondered why do these coupon sites even exist? Their primary goal has been and will always remain to attach a browser cookie to your web browser<p>I really wonder why deleting all the cookies for a given website as soon as you close it isn't the default behavior and not even a built-in option in web browsers. I use Vanilla Cookie Manager in Chrome to make it work this way.
not the top link in any of the demo'd searches, so clearly the title is false. technically. still it's fascinating.<p>> Seth Kravitz is the CEO of PHLEARN, the world’s #1 Photoshop & Lightroom training company online<p>wow. i guess CEOs of any online company have to have deep deep understanding of SEO these days. and what better SEO than blogging about things unrelated to your company! as we just saw a few days ago from 3byte.
Using another company (amazon in this case) to do your SEO for you.<p>This is so phishy. Doing a landing page on Amazon S3 and having all the link redirecting to your real website.<p>I'm starting to wonder if shady SEO marketing companies aren't already doing this to promote their "clients".<p>I hope the Google SPAM team we'll do something about it.
Wouldn't it just be that <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com</a> is linked on tens/hundreds of thousands of websites and they're capitalizing on this for SEO value, rather than 'Domain authority'?
lollll that's hilarious<p>now everyone's going to try that and it stops working<p>but then people are going to start naming their s3 buckets amazon-<i>