This is a guest post written by Dawn Rotarangi.

As you build more pages with links to Amazon products, inevitably, as either Amazon or the retailer withdraw or move products, some of the url addresses will either change or disappear.

The link will then go to an Amazon 404 – Document Not Found.

These links are leaking money from your web site!

On a small site with a few carefully tended pages this may never be a problem.  You’ll see what has happened and correct it immediately.

But on a large website with many unmonitored links this can become a nightmare if you do not know how to find these links that have been broken as a product is shifted or withdrawn.

Image links reveal when they are broken – text links do not.  They look just fine and you don’t realize that they are no longer bringing in money.

How to find if a link is going to an Amazon 404

I’ll use this site on Charm Bracelets as an example.  You can see it is a static website that sells charm jewellery.  It has hundreds, maybe thousands, of Amazon links.  Clearly it is not built according to the Amazonian Profit Plan, but is a trouble free little web site so long as the product links are kept updated.

Here is how to do that.

Each morning log in to your Amazon account.

Where it says Month to date click on Yesterday.

Underneath where it says Orders Summary click on View full report. Make sure you’re clicking on the View full report for the Orders Summary not the Earnings Summary.

This will show you a page something like this.

We all love to focus on the sales we have made – but below them there is a section called Items with no orders. Now don’t turn away from that in disappointment. That list is your friend.  You can learn a lot by seeing what people have clicked on but not bought.

However, for our purposes you can also see any links that are broken because an item has been shifted or removed from Amazon.

So click on that little downward pointing arrow beside the words Show all items.

This will show you a page something like this.

Now see those 3 items at the top of the list that are shown by their ASIN rather than the product name.

(Title not available) B003ZZXL7Q

(Title not available) B000GG0GUM

(Title not available) B0045EVGAA

Those are broken links.  Someone has clicked upon them and got the dreaded 404 – Document Not Found.  So up until that point you had a potential sale going down – suddenly you have nothing.

In fact, you have worse than nothing.  You have an annoyed shopper.  I know that when I follow links that don’t work or don’t take me to where they promised I feel annoyed and cheated and promptly leave.

So maybe your customer will take Amazon’s hint and go to the home page and continue looking.  But is your affiliate link still embedded?  I don’t know but I don’t want to take that chance.

And maybe they’ll return to your web site and continue shopping but again, I don’t want to take that chance.

What I want to do is fix that broken link just as quick as I can so that once again I have happy shoppers.  I’ve lost that potential sale but if I fix it now I won’t lose anymore.

If you’ve never looked in that Items with no orders list before, or if you’ve looked but did not understand the significance of these items listed under their ASIN numbers, it can be a bit of a shock.

If the link is “healthy” then Amazon list it under the title of the product.  If the link took your customer to the Amazon 404 then it is listed under its ASIN.

I’ve shared this secret with people who have discovered they had hundreds of non-functioning links!

Right – you’ve discovered these profit leaching links – now what to do about them

Simply change them for links to other products.  Do a keyword search and find a similar product that you can sell.  You will probably have to change some of the text on the page depending on if that page was written just for that one product.

On a shopping site, a page such as this one about Kabbalah Bracelets only needs to have a word or two changed, insert another link and it’s done.

On a page where you have carefully selected the product and written according to the Amazonian Plan you’ll need to make more extensive changes.

BUT if you change the words on the page to fit another model of the same product you get to keep all those back links that you’ve sweated blood, tears and midnight oil to get for this page.  Whichever model of Panasonic cordless drill (to use Paula and Wanda’s famous example) you write about, most of those back links will be great for any other model of Panasonic cordless drill.

In fact, many of those back links will be perfect for any model of drill.

And at the very worst – they’re still back links even if the anchor text isn’t exactly what you would choose.  How many of us have done the rounds of blog commenting where you end up with hundreds of backlinks anchored to your name?  So don’t discard the page even if you end up having to put a hedge trimmer on it. Change the Title of the page and keep the url with all those precious back links.

Not a perfect solution, I know, but this is real life in the affiliate world.  Retailers change links.  Retailers remove products.  There is nothing you can do about that.  Salvage what you can from the situation.

How to find that broken link on your own website

Now you may have spotted one flaw in what I’ve suggested.  The problem is that if you have a large site you have to actually find these links on your website.  If you have hundreds or thousands of pages spread over several websites this can be very time consuming.

Here is how to find them.  On the Amazon site request to see your orders by tracking ID.  See where it says Combined Reports?  Remove the tick and go through your various IDs until you find the ID where the product shows under its ASIN in the Items with no orders.  (I’m assuming you have a different tracking ID for each of your web sites.  If you haven’t, rectify that now.)

We’ve tracked it down to which website it is on – now we have to track it down to the page.

StatCounter is your friend, folks!

It can be added to any WordPress blog as a plugin and it will quickly and effortlessly lead you to the page you want. It can also be added to most other sites.

Over in your StatCounter interface you will see in the list of Statistics on the left of the page, one called Exit Links.

Click on that and you’ll see there are about a dozen pages of exit links there.  Go to the final page listed.  I say the final page because the links are listed according to how many clicks they have had so the problem link is amongst the ones that have only had one click on them (if you check them daily).  Work back, running your eye down the right hand side of the links until you find the one you want.

Click on that little downward pointing arrow and it will take you to the StatCounter drill down page.

On this page click on the magnifying glass to the left of the link and it will take you to the page that reveals all.

This page will tell you which of YOUR pages that link was on.

And although it might have taken you five minutes to read how to do this, one you’ve done it once or twice, you’ll find you can track these broken/changed urls very quickly.  Within a minute of discovering that a retailer has removed a product I know which page it was on and will be replacing it with another product.

One sale might have been lost but if you follow this tip you’ll never lose a second sale through a link that doesn’t go where you want.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

 

Receive a FREE Copy of our

“7 Super Powerful Methods for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog”

Powered by Subscribers Magnet

Tagged with: •

Filed under: Amazon • How to...

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!