If you want to find screenfuls of Pinterest spam pins, here’s a quick way to do it: go to http://pinterest.com/source/amzn.to/
(This was suggested in a great thread about the Pinterest spammer on the Hacker News startup forum.)
Pinterest’s special ‘source’ URLs show all the pins from a particular domain, in this case from Amazon’s amzn.to URL shortener.
Right now, almost everything on this page is spam, using the Amazon affiliate ID of numanumaman-20.
No doubt there are spam links to other sites, too. Or if not, there will be soon. But for now, Amazon.com, with its wide range of pinnable products is the most obvious site for a spammer to send people to.
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It’s a violation of the Amazon Associates Program Agreement to put your affiliate link on any site you do not own. The same holds true for the eBay Partner Network.
Hopefully Amazon will crack down on any accounts that are actively posting links to sites they do not own.
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. I wonder how Amazon view this sort of thing. Aggressive affiliates must bring them extra sales, but it surely can’t be worth the potential bad PR.
Is it really spam? It’s just product images, or ads for items a lot of people may actually want to see/buy?
Also, its crazy stupid to use a bare affiliate link. You should always use a redirect, or even just a link to a landing page with the product on it ( with aff link there) and even a lead capture on the sidebar. Maybe even a little content locking deal. Not sure why Amazon is the merchant of choice here with their pathetically low commissions.
haha scott, u little pecker