Commission Junction's recent announcement about the upcoming change from standard text links to JavaScript links for all of their affiliate links has caused quite a bit of uproar in the affiliate community. For those of you who haven't heard here are the basics, as I understand them:

1. Starting June 23, 2006, new advertisers will only deliver JavaScript links. Older advertisers will start offering JavaScript links but legacy links will work for some time.
2. Advertisers who wish to support email and search publishers will need to provide email and keyword links for these publishers, which will use the old HTML style. If these links don't exist the advertiser doesn't allow that type of affiliate marketing. Email and Search marketers must use these links going forward.
3. Old "legacy" html links that exist on sites today will be fazed out sometime in the future, but publishers will be given at least 6-month's notice before these links will stop working. (This notice has not been given at this time).

Commission Junction has provided FAQs (cj login required) to help advertisers and publishers better understand the upcoming change.

Personally, I like the idea of having the option of using JavaScript links for certain links of my sites, and understand that these links can provide enhanced functionality like rotating offers, keeping the latest offers up to date, etc... I have used these types of links on occasion successfully with other advertisers on other networks.

I have also run into some problems with JavaScript links. Here are just a few of them:

Search Engines
The content in JavaScript links are invisible to most search engines. This means for text links your content is only partially visible. CJ's current argument is that since search engines appear to be looking to provide negative values to sites with affiliate links and by switching to JavaScript the search engines won't know you have affiliate links.

This argument is really short sited. When the largest affiliate network switches link types, you can bet that the search engines will recognize them in the near future. This isn't going to help publishers search rankings.

Blogs and Web Builder Tools
I have been using TypePad for a while to build blog sites. Initially posting JavaScript in your message will work if you select HTML mode first, but if you subsequently have to make any change to your post, the JavaScript is stripped out and will need to be re-built from scratch. This is a major hurdle. Additionally, many website building tools provided with your hosting packages don't support full html or JavaScript entries. These template web building products often just have a hyperlink button where you can enter the URL you want to link your text or image to.

Form Links
Often with a website you might want to create an html form style link to your site. Maybe it's a radio button, drop down list, or Click Box. (Examples: 10BestSelling Drop Down at the Top, Viener Shop - List of Merchants in the Middle). Converting these over may be difficult.

Redirect Links
Many affiliates utilize tools on their site to capture additional click data and these tools often take the form of a redirection. These could be home grown tools, ad-running software, or content management software. Integrating JavaScript links into these tools would be very problematic.

I personally manage the affiliate relationships for a consulting client, where they have a lot of content and I have taken on the role of monetizing their site. In order to avoid having to go through all their content over and over again when a merchant switches programs, I registered a new domain and have setup 301 redirects in the htaccess file for each vendor's link. This way I can just reference www.domain.com/afflink.html and automatically redirect to the url of the site. This setup simply won't support JavaScript.

AdBlocking
Commission Junction has touted that using JavaScript may avoid the recent rise in cookie blocking and ad blocking tools, but in their argument they fail to point out that JavaScript is also heavily blocked by these same tools!

Yes, it's true that many other affiliate networks offer JavaScript links and that there are some advantages to these links in certain situations. But there is no other network out there, that i know of, that is forcing JavaScript links as the only option. Even when it is the default option, html, iframe, and other types of links are provided.

Conclusion
Based on my conversations with my contacts at CJ, I think they are in Phase I of this role out, and haven't really thought through all of the issues clearly enough. I personally consider this June 23rd role-out a wide spread beta, and think they will learn a lot and doubt that we will see the HTML links going away for a long time.