You can always join an ethical sex toy affiliate program with Vibrators.com – http://www.vibrators.com

just saying….

Of course, ‘If they broke an ACTUAL agreement’, that would be one thing, a legal kind of thing perhaps, but agreement here means agreement on the definition of “reciprocal”, which is not really a difficult word.

Also common practices among “adult web stores” is an appeal to anonymous authority http://atheism.about.com/od/logicalfallacies/a/authority_4.htm . Point out logical fallcy is not “entitlement” (Lovely coincidence I was writing a “sex and logic” article for Edencafe that discusses this very fallacy, when this shitstorm began)

You fallacies will not work at this time please hang up and try your fallacy again.

If someone makes a claim, I’m going to ask them to back it up with examples. Sorry if my logic offends you. Are you drinking again?

But what EF is doing is a whole ‘nother ballgame of nefariousness. They LOOK like they are giving return links — and they aren’t.

Illegal? Probably not. Unethical? In my book, fuck yeah.

ps–I’m blockquoting the piece you quoted above from Tom Allen to make it a little more clear.

“Just so you are aware, it’s not just EF that plays games with the link reciprocation. A few years ago, I was asked by several online adult product companies to exchange links. I checked their websites (to make sure they were actually selling products), and put up text links in my sidebar. I then promptly forgot about them.

A few months later, I was checking my blog stats, and suddenly remembered that I had those links up. I discovered that I had not a single hit from either of them. I then went back to those websites and discovered that neither of them had any “links of interest” page. Nowhere did EoV show up on the sites. I didn’t think much of it, and removed the text links from my side bar.

A few weeks later, I received an email from one of the companies, complaining that I had removed the link. I expressed my surprise at his complaint, since there weren’t *any* links to other blogs or websites at their site. He explained that they never link to anything directly, but that they set up another website on which the exchanged links would appear. Oh, and would I please put the links back, or they would be compelled to remove my own link from their exchange site?

I spent some time searching for it, and finally had to ask for the address. Yeah, there was a link to my blog, plus links to other places, but there didn’t seem to be anything attracting people to that site. I told them that since their exchange page had not resulted in one single visit to my own, that I would not be replacing their text link.

OFGS! I just went to check Gmail to see if I could find the email exchanges, and you’ll never guess who one of the link exchanges was with!

Just out of curiosity, I checked my blog stats to see how many referrals I’ve had from Eden Fantasies. While I’ve had a number of outclicks to your webstore, I didn’t see any reciprocal traffic. I then went to the Eden Fantasies web site, and spent the last five minutes trying to find a page that has links to other blogs and personal web sites. I don’t even see anything listed in the Site Map.

Could you explain to me where I might find those links?

And the response:

As we usually use ABC exchange – we put reciprocal links to our other sites Link directories
http://www.exalte.com/LinksCategories.aspx

So, I guess that there really is a link exchange, of sorts. Kind of. But it’s really a shame that EF would take advantage of the… let’s call it the spirit of the sex blogging community.”

But because other companies do it doesn’t make it ‘okay.’

Britni & AAG – I went to google and read their ethics thing and so even I can’t really argue that it’ not unethical by their standards – and they’ll probably get seriously kicked in the ass for it. It isn’t illegal, though (and as Sarah Sloane pointed out, they even have a clause in their contract to cover their ass: “Author agrees that company has it’s own discretion to format editorial material, embed advertisement, hyperlinks, and visual arts within it…”)

But just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t make it ‘okay.’

As I wrote, as a blogger who receives toys, money and gift cards from them, I personally don’t feel I have any reason to feel wronged – but I do accept that the ‘spirit’ of reciprocal links has definitely been compromised. In addition, I think Eden Fantasys will probably be in serious trouble with Google and their web partners.

Please.