Well well, this looks like a pretty crappy situation all around. It sounds like this other affiliate guy is using his personal and social relationships to corner the niche. Obviously this is someone who thinks the market is saturated and the best way to grow is to muscle out the competition – so this is no team player that the affiliate managers are backing up. The fact that they’re playing along and don’t seem to understand the technical crimes they’ve accused you of then leads me to question the affiliate program itself.

In a situation like this, I’m not sure if public attention can help one get re-instated. I’d do whatever was possible to get into private contact with the affiliate managers to explain your side of the situation and to demonstrate examples from similar sites.

If that doesn’t work, well, then maybe the best thing would be to warn others to stay clear of the program and use your site to promote similar alternatives. It sucks that the search engines reward ultra-focus so we have incentives to build domains for each product, but its terribly risky to put everything into a single brand. I got burned myself that way once when one company I was promoting heavily ended up slashing their payout by like 75% across the board. So as much as SEO favors a focus, business in general still favors a diversified approach.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts.

The article is at http://thesisthemehq.com/summary-innocent-thesis-theme-affiliate-still-waiting-for-public-apologies-reinstatement-to-the-thesis-theme-forum-affiliate-program/

Cheers

Somone