Really confused about Amazon links now...

built

built

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Whats the deal, heard so many conflicting things? Do I use pretty links and redirect them or just naked Amazon links.
 
Using a URL shortner will give the ability to track your clicks on each affiliate link and other imortart metrics.
It makes it look like your a lot more professional too IMO rather than just dumping a long ass link. So I'd use pretty links for sure.
 
Michael said:
Using a URL shortner will give the ability to track your clicks on each affiliate link and other imortart metrics.
It makes it look like your a lot more professional too IMO rather than just dumping a long ass link. So I'd use pretty links for sure.
Click to expand...
If that's the reason you're advocating URL shortening, there are better ways to handle it. You can setup Google Analytics or any type of event capture based on click listeners. Set it to capture the URL the click happened on, the anchor text/image alt/image url the click happened to, and the link the person is being taken to. All without doing any kind of risk / future damage when selling your site.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Built, check out this thread. Lots of discussion and I even talked to Amazon's people and reported back. Should clarify everything.

https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/cloak-amazon-affiliate-links.2119/
726 x 116​
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@built basically, my takeaways from that thread were: redirects are 100% okay, just clearly state the link is going to Amazon, use a url structure like site.com/this-goes-to-amazon/item1, and have the affiliate disclosure on a TOS/Privacy page in the footer of the site.
 
Hey @Ryuzaki or anyone else who knows more about amz than me, Amazon SiteStripe allows you to get a link, an image, and image + text. So, one of the options is just the hyperlinked image. That means it's okay to have images on a website that are linked to Amazon without needing to introduce the image as an affiliate link... right? (Assuming we have a footer link to a disclaimer page). Also, I wouldn't be using their exact code, I'd be snipping the image so I could host myself (no editing though).
 
Yes, you can use image links. The URL structure will indicate that it's going to Amazon, which is good enough. But huge sites don't use URL structures like this a lot of times and never get in trouble so it's up to you how safe you want to play it.

I talked to Amazon support about images once. They prefer you to use their image links where it hot links the image, for tracking purposes. But I do the same as you. I grab the image myself and re-host it. They said it was okay but I may be asked about it one day.

Just make sure you aren't altering the image beyond cropping out white space, etc. It must be representative of what is shown on the page you're linking to. So no adding logos and extra stuff. Only resizing and cropping.
 
Seems like you can do anything you want as long as amazon can see where the traffic is coming from then? I'm guessing they are doing this to stop cookie stuffers?
 
Ryuzaki said:
Yes, you can use image links. The URL structure will indicate that it's going to Amazon, which is good enough. But huge sites don't use URL structures like this a lot of times and never get in trouble so it's up to you how safe you want to play it.

I talked to Amazon support about images once. They prefer you to use their image links where it hot links the image, for tracking purposes. But I do the same as you. I grab the image myself and re-host it. They said it was okay but I may be asked about it one day.

Just make sure you aren't altering the image beyond cropping out white space, etc. It must be representative of what is shown on the page you're linking to. So no adding logos and extra stuff. Only resizing and cropping.
Click to expand...

Okay, SOLID, I was concerned because they are anal about introducing every single link as 'goes to amazon' and none of my posts so far have been top 10 products where I can just say "all links go to" at the top. Being able to add amz images into posts without introducing them is going to be perfect.
 
The MAIN thing is that your site has a page linked sitewide that features the "I'm a member of Amazon Associates program." As long as that exists and they can see the traffic is coming from your site (and your site is registered in your account and doesn't promote to children) you should see no issue. I'm realizing 99% of the people getting banned turn around and lie about why they got banned and pretend innocence. They're doing iFrames, dropping their links on sites that aren't their own, etc.
 
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