Wordpress - checking affiliate links for changed offers etc
- Thread starter bernard
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For my amazon associates links (and all external links for that matter) I use the plugin, Broken Link Checker (search for it on the WordPress plugin search), which checks all the external links on my WordPress site every 72 hours (that's an adjustable timeframe). One thing to note is that on your Associates account, it will show clicks on all those links every 72 hours because of the checking, so expect that one stat to blow up if you pay attention to that kind of thing.
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bernard
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Does it check broken links through redirects?
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I'd recommend you use your own spider to crawl your site. You can do it multi-threaded with a specific user-agent to block it from messing up your analytics too. They don't load ads so there's no concern about them following ad links.
An Amazon employee told me that they don't care about the clicks either, as they understand we need to check and would prefer for live links to be in place. The problem with Amazon is "dead items" don't throw a 404 error, so you need to check the important ones manually. Also, if you know the item you're linking to goes in and out of stock or is only under a lot of 3rd party vendors, you'll do better to link to the search results for the item name.
Anyways, for Windows the first two can get the job done, and on Mac I prefer the last one:
Each has a free version that will do what you need. You can configure them to follow through redirects, or mark redirects as errors so you can check and make sure you're not linking to someone's PBN suddenly, etc. They can also check for broken images, maybe Youtube vids (not sure on that one, it's been a while, I wrote my own lil code for that).
As far as Affiliate Links only, this is why people deal with redirect systems like "Pretty Links." You'll hear people call it "cloaking" but that's not correct.
So for instance I have a system set up where each vendor has it's own sub-folder like /amazon, /walmart, /target, /bodybuilding... and within that you can do what you want with more sub-folders, etc. But what this does is bring your affiliate links to one location, so when you need to change one you can change it in one spot and it propagates across your whole site. This is good for when you link to the same product 100x across your site. You only change it once, not 100 times.
While I'm mentioning this, I want to mention for anyone reading, please make sure you set these redirects up to throw a header response of nofollow and noindex, and set the main folders to noindex. You need to nofollow all affiliate links or they are technically paid links. And you don't want Google indexing Walmart's pages under your domain.
An Amazon employee told me that they don't care about the clicks either, as they understand we need to check and would prefer for live links to be in place. The problem with Amazon is "dead items" don't throw a 404 error, so you need to check the important ones manually. Also, if you know the item you're linking to goes in and out of stock or is only under a lot of 3rd party vendors, you'll do better to link to the search results for the item name.
Anyways, for Windows the first two can get the job done, and on Mac I prefer the last one:
Each has a free version that will do what you need. You can configure them to follow through redirects, or mark redirects as errors so you can check and make sure you're not linking to someone's PBN suddenly, etc. They can also check for broken images, maybe Youtube vids (not sure on that one, it's been a while, I wrote my own lil code for that).
As far as Affiliate Links only, this is why people deal with redirect systems like "Pretty Links." You'll hear people call it "cloaking" but that's not correct.
So for instance I have a system set up where each vendor has it's own sub-folder like /amazon, /walmart, /target, /bodybuilding... and within that you can do what you want with more sub-folders, etc. But what this does is bring your affiliate links to one location, so when you need to change one you can change it in one spot and it propagates across your whole site. This is good for when you link to the same product 100x across your site. You only change it once, not 100 times.
While I'm mentioning this, I want to mention for anyone reading, please make sure you set these redirects up to throw a header response of nofollow and noindex, and set the main folders to noindex. You need to nofollow all affiliate links or they are technically paid links. And you don't want Google indexing Walmart's pages under your domain.
illmasterj
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Thread dig: does anyone have a smart way of doing this in 2021?
I know about GeniusLink and use WPMU Broken Link Checker. The former is an added expense and means loading more scripts on my site, while the latter regularly shows a bunch of
I know about GeniusLink and use WPMU Broken Link Checker. The former is an added expense and means loading more scripts on my site, while the latter regularly shows a bunch of
503 Service Unavailable errors.
Cash Builder
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I'm also looking for a better solution for this. The best I have found is a software called amzwatcher. I like it because it also finds items that are out of stock rather than just returning 404 pages. It is a bit pricey though, especially the more/bigger sites that you have.
I'm thinking maybe pay someone to create a script that does this, and then you just pay once rather than monthly subscription fees. The tools that @Ryuzaki mentioned would work too, but the free version of Screaming Frog only lets you crawl 500 URLs (which includes image URLs and external links).