Manually refining Amazon search results links

I just joined Amazon Associates yesterday, and saw this 1.5 year old post on the official Associated blog:

http://affiliate-blog.amazon.com/2007/04/associate_tip_r.html

And since I'm a control freak, I liked the idea of tweaking these links myself. These links are really short, not like the huge product links with the tracking pixel that you can generate on the Amazon site.

Of course after I type everything I check the URL in the Link Checker. It tells me Success: The link tags to a valid tag or sub-tag for your Associate ID.

My question is: Since it doesn't have the tracking pixel and since I tweak these links, can I be banned?

Stupid (noobish) question, I know, but I remember I saw something in their TOS that says I shouldn't change the links.

Please assist me,
Thanks in advance!

PS: I like linking to a search results page because this way I won't be linking to an unavailable product in the future. My visitors will see the product if it's there, or they will see an alternative if it's no longer available.

 

In the absence of any scientific answer, I would say there is no problem with changing Amazon links. I am not sure why they would proscribe this in the TOS, but people are doing it ALL the time. The only thing that really matters at the end of the day is that the link is valid in terms of its destination, and that the tag/associate ID is correctly passed on. If you look back through some threads on this forum, you will see discussion of how to make really short Amazon links. Maybe someone else can help out with this, but I don't believe there's any problem with that at all.

 

Thanks markowe,
I guess a php redirect is ok too?
The reason I'm asking this is that in CJ you only can change links with the permission of the advertisers. Although a lot do redirects, I tend to be extra careful, being new to this and all.

PS: Interesting, I tried to add to your rep just now, but the button didn't seem to work, so I tried pressing it more. In the end it gave about 5 notifications that I added successfully... So I added 5 times or was that a glitch?

 

Heh, thanks for the rep - it only got posted once! But DP does go a bit screwy sometimes, maybe it's just high traffic...

Anyway, by all means ask around some more about those links, wouldn't want you having any problems, but like I say, it doesn't seem to be a problem. In fact if you use Amazon's "link to any page" tool, all that is doing pretty much is redirecting that big long link with your tag included, so it's not as if Amazon has some strict criteria about what a link is supposed to look like!

 

All this affiliate linking business seems to me like a taboo. You can't find any specific rules about it. Amazon Associates seems more clear than others like CJ, though. I've been googling and I found out that a lot of people actually use php redirects with all of their links. What do you think? Is it safe to do it?

I don't want to be banned. Being new in an affiliate program AND living in Ukraine makes me think that Amazon/CJ/LinkShare etc. won't think twice before banning me.

 

Thought of updating this...
I asked on the Amazon forums if it's allowed to php redirect links. I was told that it's common practice to redirect links, and that unless I was planning something sneaky with those redirects, everything will be fine.
That comment made me laugh. If I were planning something sneaky, why would I ask if it's allowed or not?!

I have already started redirecting the links, and I used the code I found on these following pages. Simple and cool! Not only php redirecting, but I now can also check how many clicks there were on these links.

http://studge.com/hiding-links-with-php-and-counting-clicks-with-mysql/

The second link contains the code needed to check the number of clicks on each link:

http://studge.com/displaying-click-counts-with-php-and-mysql/

 

Thanks for getting back and letting us know. So no sneaky stuff, huh, just "nice" redirects!

I see they are using an http header to redirect, which is the way I have done it - except some people think Google doesn't like these. Personally I think Google objects to people using this technique to redirect whole sites and do dodgy cloaking stuff, but it's worth noting.

This is a nice implementation, but if you are getting your links live from the Amazon Web Service, or whatever, you can't manually put them in your d/base, obviously, so you have to write some sort of code to store these links. Also, that means potentially lots of database calls, so it might be better to do this with some sort of disk cache.

But the way I have done it up till now is create a link like: jump.php?jumpt=jhgJKHGKJHGJKhgkjhgJKHGKGJ

...where the jhgJKHGKJHGJKhgkjhgJKHGKGJ is the URL you want to go to, but encoded using base64, or something that the average user is not going to know about. Then in jump.php you decode it and do a header redirect like in the database example.

Sure, those links aren't too pretty, but at least they are not www.amazon.blablabla or even worse, rover.ebay.blablabla! And they can be generated on-the-fly with less processor overhead.

 

markowe,

I am redirecting to Amazon Search results. I really don't know what their web services are, tbh... And I didn't bother finding out because I found a good advertiser through ShareASale who have 60-day cookies. Compare that to the 24-hour cookie from Amazon! I will still put links to Amazon I guess, but not exclusively.

So many affiliates do redirects, as I recently found out. Experienced ones, too. I don't think Google penalizes a simple redirect. Or is there something fishy you saw in the code?

I hope it's not the case with Google, because my articles started to vanish from the index a couple of days ago. These articles didn't contain any redirects whatsoever. Completely original content, I don't copy anything from anywhere. I sometimes read reviews on Amazon and similar sites, then write everything from scratch. The only thing I can think of is that I have 8-10 photos in each article, and they have similar alt text, since it's the same product but different colors. Since I started having this indexing problem, I decided to delete the "title" text from the images. I didn't want to be accused of keyword stuffing.

I'll write about it in the SEO forum I guess if the issue doesn't resolve.

 

Letting you all know that Google is behaving now, my articles are climbing the SERPs. Currently on the first page for some keyphrases with about 200K-250K results. That's good right? These articles are about a month old, so I guess I'm doing fine SEO wise.

Not bragging, just being happy! I can only talk to my wife and to the people on this board about this. Try saying the words SEO, SERPs, nofollow etc. in a room full of people. They'll think that you're talking alien! Don't even think of saying "cookie stuffing"...

 

Mmm... cookie-stuffing!

I don't know why Google would penalise your articles if they were original and not keyword-stuffed. I am not sure the Title tags on the pictures would do that - we are encouraged to use proper title and alt tags, surely? Well, sigh, we never really know what the big G is up to - I think sometimes we overreact, there's all kinds of weird stuff goes on with the SERPS, they go up and down for no apparent reason. Especially when your pages are new - I see complete sites appear, disappear, reappear... I think it's normal for the early period, probably the less data Google has on your page the more wild variations in ranking there will be. Once the various algorithms have had a chance to work things settle down.

Anyway, lucky you, I can't even really talk to my wife about this - her eyes start to glaze over