- Dr. Mortal
Copyright Information in this document is the sole property of Dr. Mortal („The Copyright Holders‟ ). ). No part of this document may be duplicated, transmitted, resold or reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the copyright holder. Unauthorized duplication of this ebook in any way or form is strictly prohibited. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Disclaimer The copyright holder Dr. Mortal does not assume any responsibility for the use or misuse of this information. Any financial loss sustained to any persons or property from the use of this information is solely the result of the individual, and, or company. Dr. Mortal does not guarantee any future results using this information. You will learn proven Cookie Stuffing methods, but what you personally achieve will not be the results from this information. In order to achieve the personal satisfaction desired is solely up to the reader / user, by what actions are taken. The amount of time, money, and effort you put forth will determine upon your individual results.
Introduction With this ebook, I'll try to give you everything you need to know about cookie stuffing to get started and learn some decent advanced stuff to be as undetectable as possible. This is not a step by step guide on how to make money or get accepted at affiliate networks, but a guide which gives you the knowledge to understand and develop methods on your own. I basically wrote this ebook, because I think the CS talk on BHW hit rock bottom, so hopefully a few people that are new to CS get a introduction and some that already know the basics get some new ideas and methods, so the CS talk perk up again. One thing before we are getting started: If you have problems understanding something, read it again and if you still don't understand what I am trying to say, please feel free to ask me, whether I don't explained it well or my english sucked too much;-) Are you ready? Then let's go...
What is Cookie Stuffing and why does it work? First of all, why do affiliate networks use cookies? When you refer someone with your affiliate link to a website and he/she makes a sale you get your commission. The cookie tells them that he/she came to their website through your link, even if they left the website in between. In short, they track their sales with the cookie. Different advertisers use different length of time till a cookie expires. Most of them use 30 or 60 days. But before stuffing them, please make sure there is a cookie time duration, because it could also be that they use session cookies. That would mean that the cookie expires (gets deleted) when the user closes his browser. So you don't get commission when he purchases something after closing his browser in between, which is very likely when stuffing people. Now, what is cookie stuffing? The term Cookie Stuffing“ means, that you give a user or better hundreds and thousands of users :P - your affiliate cookie without them knowing about it. Why? Because you get commission when they buy something from your advertiser! So, your goal is to give them your cookie in a way they don't notice it. Now, you'll learn how to stuff people and later on I'll explain different methods to hide your tracks.
Basic Methods There are different methods to stuff a user. Which you choose depends mostly on where you stuff. There are four well-known methods: . . . .
Iframe Stuffing ● Image Stuffing ● Javascript Stuffing ● Flash Stuffing ●
In this ebook we'll focus on the first two of them (Iframe Stuffing and Image Stuffing). With them we can stuff easily and are almost undetectable (with a few tricks). So, let's start!
Iframe Stuffing
I think iframe stuffing is the most known and easiest to understand method to stuff someone, BUT it's also the quickest method to get you banned if you don't hide your stuffing. In this chapter I'll explain how it works and in a later chapter I'll give you methods to hide it. Iframes are designed for including other documents in a frame in your webpage. That means another webpage is now part of your webpage and is loaded whenever your webpage is loaded. So, if you paste your affiliate link in your iframe, it gets loaded every time someone loads your webpage. Now, when you put your affiliate link in the iframe, the site gets loaded and the cookie gets stuffed. The code looks like this: <iframe src="http://www.affiliate-link.com/" width="1" frameborder="0">
height="1"
In this code I made two important things. The first one is that I made the iframe 1 pixel high and 1 pixel wide, so no one can see the content of the iframe. But in some browsers you still see the iframe, because there is a border. To get rid of the border and make sure the iframe is kind of invisible I set the frameborder to 0. Now, you know the basics of iframe stuffing, but please don't stuff without any further protection. Some ebooks say this would be safe and no one will notice the iframe. Don't be an idiot, your affiliate manager will look into your code and WILL find the iframe! If you are unlucky he already notices that a cookie gets dropped when he just visits your site. Just read on, before starting to stuff!
Image Stuffing
Now, let's start with the Image Stuffing. At first, I'll give you the code:
You wonder why this works? Why this stuffs a cookie, even though the webpage (http://www.affiliate-link.com) does NOT get loaded? It's not like an iframe: The webpage doesn't load, because you just want to have an image! In order to understand why Image Stuffing works, you need to know how HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is designed. Every message – means your request to the server and the response from it – is made up of two parts: The header and the body. The header contains important information about the body such as the data type or the code, so the receiver can interpret the actual data, which is in the body, correctly. Now, when you use the above code, you ask for an image. You won't get the webpage, because it isn't an image, but you'll get the header! This is the important part, you'll get the header! And you know what? The cookie is transferred via the header! You get the header, you get the cookie! Ok, this was a knaggy passage, but I hope you got it. If not, feel free to ask me. Important is that you understand that the cookie is in the header! If you want more information on this use big G with the term “HTTP Header”. When you try the above code with FF, you'll hopefully see nothing. When you try it with IE, you'll probably see a red x. If you try it with Opera you might see a box with the text “Image” in it. And if you try it with Safari you might see a box with a question mark in it. I think these are the four most important browsers. Now, let's get rid of these things. Here are 3 different solutions: 1. 2. 3.
1. height="1" + width="1" 2. alt=" " 3. display:none
I often read that people have problems with the red x, even though they use number 1 (downsizing the image). For some reason, I don't. I tested it with different versions of MSIE, FF, Opera and Safari and never had any problems. Anyway, I often read to use the alt tag with just a space character in it. Another method that works is to hide it with CSS. If you don't know how to use these three things, I give you the code in which I include them:
height="1"
width="1"
alt="
"
This will help you only on your own sites or in forums which allow HTML. Image Stuffing has advantages and disadvantages over Iframe Stuffing. I think the
most important advantage of Image Stuffing is that it doesn't need to load the whole webpage when stuffing so that you don't see something loading in the status bar for a long time. This would be a weakness of Iframe Stuffing. Another disadvantage of Iframe Stuffing might be that the AM detect your stuffing much faster when going to your source code. But with Iframe Stuffing you can change the referer which you can't do with Image Stuffing. More on that later. I hope you understood all the stuff I talked about, because now we are going to learn some advanced stuff :-) If you don't, please read it again before reading on.
Methods to make your stuffing nearly undetectable In this section, I'll try to give you as many tips as I can to hide your stuffing. In order to realize these tricks, I'll often give you code which you have to put in your .htaccess file. For those of you who have no experience in cookie stuffing or web development, I'll tell you what you have to know about it. The .htaccess file is a configuration file for your server. You have to create it and put it in the main directory. You don't know how to create such a file? Then I'll tell you (this is for windows users): You open the Editor which is provided by default, type in your code and click on “save as...”. Now, you click “All Files” where it says “File type” and where it says “File Name” you enter “.htaccess” without the quotation marks, but with the point/dot. Now, you're done. With this file you can password protect directories, deny IPs, redirect files and so on. You see, it can be very helpful! Sorry, for those of you who knew that before, but this is also a guide for people who are knew to this stuff. Don't worry, the advanced stuff is not far away...
Blanking the referer
If you don't want the AM to see the site on which you are stuffing, one way is to blank the referer, so your AM don't see where the traffic is coming from. Please, do me a favor and don't blank the referer when using CJ (Commission Junction). They really don't like blank referers and might even ban you for that. When using CJ, always fake the referer - I'll talk about it later. For blanking the referer, the DMR (Double Meta Refresh) has proven of value. First of all, I'll give you the code, then I'll explain:
redirect1.php "; ?>
redirect2.php "; } else { echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://www.your-site.com\">"; } ?>
Now, you just have to link your traffic to redirect1.php. This traffic will then get redirected to redirect2.php with a meta-refresh. A meta-refresh blanks the referer in most browsers, therefore we use it. But it blanks it NOT in all browsers, so we have to check it. We do this with the redirect2.php: If the referer is blank, it sends the user to your affiliate link (http://www.affiliate-link.com), if not it sends him to another site of your choice (http://www.your-site.com).
CSing is a game.Play hard and earn big……..
With which stuffing method does that work? It works when you do Iframe Stuffing, but not when you do image stuffing. So, when you stuff with an iframe, put the redirect1.php in the iframe. I heard people say an iframe blanks the referer; this may be right for some browsers, but NOT for all, so you have to put the DMR in the iframe in order to blank the referer of all your users. You wonder if it is possible to blank the referer when you are stuffing with images? It is, but only for IE users! This may be helpful when stuffing forums, but you always have to send traffic from a second source to your affiliate link, because it would look very suspicious if you were only sending IE users. In order to blank the referer you need SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), it's a security protocol. You can see if it is used when you look
at the address bar: If there is a “https://” before the URL. How to blank the referer exactly (when image stuffing), I'll show you later (in the forum stuffer part), after discussing a few more things. Then we will code a little image stuffer with some of the things we have learned ;-)
Checking the referer
Before we are able to fake the referer, we need to talk about how to check the referer. This is not only useful when you want to fake the referer. Imagine you can stuff only people which are coming from a specific webpage or domain to your site. You could stuff only people who are coming from Google or if you want only people who are coming from Google and searched for a specific term. If you are experienced in cloaking you know how to do it. This is very easy, but I think the best way to protect you from stuffing your AM. If you read this guide carefully, you already know how to check the referer, but here is the code again: This script will look up the referer and save it in the variable named “referer”. We used this in the DMR, too. So, if you want to stuff only people who are coming from http://www.abc.com/page5.html you would take the following code and put it somewhere in your webpage (between and ): "; } ?> In this example, we obviously stuff with the image method, so be aware that it will pass the referer. But don't worry, this is not bad, your AM won't get stuffed, because he doesn't come from the above referer. You want to stuff people who are coming from a specific domain regardless from which page of this domain? Here is the code with Google.com by way of example:
"; } ?> At first, we get the referer and save it in the variable $referer. Then we use the substr function in oder to cut our string (the referer) to our needs. Now, important is what the two numbers mean. The first number is the start position of the string; 0 is the first character. The second number is the length of the new string we want to have (here 22). This means it cuts the referer, for example http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=education so that we start at the position 0 (first character) and count 22 characters ( http://www.google.com/). Thus, the new string has a length of 22 characters. This string is now saved in the variable named $domain. The if loop and the stuffing code should be clear, I think. You can do that with every URL you want. →
Faking the referer
When I say faking the referer I don't really mean faking, but I don't know how to put it more correctly. You will see what I mean ;-) This works not with images or only with a mix of image and iframe. I will show you how to fake the referer with an iframe. We have 3 pages in my example. Your Black Hat Site, another page (e.g. a subpage of your BH Site) and your White Hat Site. On your Black Hat Page you'll stuff with an iframe. In this iframe you'll open the subpage I talked about. This page just redirects the user to your BH Site, but with a redirect which passes the referer. The White Hat Site will read the referer and either redirect the user to the affiliate link or open the normal White Hat Site. Now, the important part: The White Hat Site only makes the redirect to the affiliate link when the referer is the subpage of the BH Site. This means that the redirect method we used (on the subpage of the BH Site) passes the referer in the browser the user uses. Now, on the White Hat Site we redirect them with the exact same redirect method we used on the BH subpage, so we can be sure that the affiliate network will see the White Hat Site as the referer (in 100% of cases). But if they go to your White Hat Site, they will see your normal site, because they don't have the BH
subpage as referer. The method seems a bit familiar to you? No wonder, it's similar to the DMR with the referer checking to make sure the browser does what we want it to do :-) Now, it's time to code it and it's a little bit more complicated as I described it, because we need two different redirects for different browsers. One for IE and one for all the other browsers. This is because we need a method that passes the referer, but the first one does not redirect correctly with IE and the other does not redirect with FF. I tried it with a few browsers and different versions of them and decided that it's best to split these two methods like the way I told (one for IE, the other one for the rest). This means that we need to check the browser the user is using. Now, I'll give you the code to redirect them: subpage_of_bh-site.php
redirect 
