I must admit I hadn’t really thought about this until a couple of days ago when two different sponsors send me broken FHG links. Both had redirects set up to divert traffic to a site completely unrelated to what was being promoted.
It got me thinking. Why should sponsors get to keep my traffic if they screw up and break their own gallery links? I don’t have any control over their mistakes, so why are they using my traffic for their sole benefit?
Then I realized unscrupulous sponsors could really cash in on this with a script that randomly breaks their FHGs. Similar to the way TGPs redirect surfers with traffic trades, the same could be done with FHG traffic but only the sponsor benefits. And there is no easy way I know of to catch them at it. I must say it’s made me very suspicious of any sponsor redirecting to something self serving…a BIG red flag, if you will.
While this is only a partial test, I decided to intentionally break links to FHGs from a variety of sponsors I work with. Depending on how the link was broken some retained my referral ID and redirected to something relevant, or served up an error 404 page. Others consistently redirected to something self serving. I’m not going to name names, but you might want to do this test yourself. It can be very interesting to discover who is protecting your traffic, or NOT!
