Rakeback Affiliates are doomed??: Discuss

I was doing some research and analysis on rakeback sites recently for one of my clients, and to my shock (and my client’s horror), It seems that the merchants [poker rooms] are quite happy to let superaffiliates get away with trademark abuse while legitimate “white-hat” affils fritter away their money, time and effort trying to legitimately get traffic. What also was amazing was the amount of blackhat activity going on among the top 15 sites for “rakeback”

some examples: Legit???

xhttp://betfairrakeback.com
xhttp://www.betfairpokerrakeback.com/
xhttp://rakebackdevilfish.com/
xhttp://www.powerpokerrakeback.com/
xhttp://www.cakerakeback.com/
xhttp://www.ultimatebetrakeback.com/
xhttp://www.absolutepokerrakeback.com/
xhttp://www.pkrpokerrakeback.com/
xhttp://www.interpokerrakeback.com/
xhttp://www.fulltiltpokerrakeback.com/

I remember reading Matt Cutts saying that this technique is tantamount to spamming (buying a domain per keyword and mini-siting]..

Amusingly the owner of these sites (believe me, there are loads more) is the one and only [do the whois yourself if interested]. sound familiar? they should b/c they won some cap “awards” and bear the GPWA seal)

Funny that they I believe they are also whitelabel rakeback site providers. Ironically It seems they are screwing their affiliates (they don’t stand a chance of ever getting ranked now do they…) and also I notice they have a nice little link to their site on all the whitelabel sites too. The terms and conditions for many of these merchants FORBIDS trademark abuse like this.

Shouldn’t merchants be seizing these domains asap and encouraging genuine affils to keep promoting their brands?? Of course they won’t bite the hand that feeds them… they can obviously track who owns the sites by registering a dummy account on each domain and checking who it’s tagged to..

what do you rakeback affiliates think? Is there any point in setting up a rakeback site that depends on organic serp traffic If everyone is cheating?

Don’t get me started on the other sites who are blackhatting like crazy (parasite hosting spamming like crazy, or deploying copious amounts of daily blog spam articles that don’t even make sense..).. RB seems to be where all the dirty tricksters are..

I’m just wondering what the point is. If you can’t beat em, join em?
Thoughts from RB affiliates please….

I’m not one for outing people usually, but this defies belief.