A method of affiliate marketing provides inbound affiliate link credit without coded URLs. Affiliate web sites link directly to merchant web sites, so that all of a merchant site's affiliates potentially contribute to its inbound link credit. The merchant web server parses incoming web page requests, and extracts the referrer. The merchant web server, directly or via an affiliate network manager, consults a database of affiliate web sites to determine whether the referrer is an authorized affiliate. If so, the affiliate is credited for the traffic, and may additionally be credited for user activity at the merchant site. The affiliate network manager writes a cookie to the user terminal to further track the user through the affiliate network. The method reduces or eliminates cookie hijacking and other forms of affiliate fraud, and may be used to track non-affiliate referring web sites.