Affiliate Link Checking and Link Updating

Especially in the case of text links embedded in articles

[Webwork]

What's the best and the worst way to deal with keeping affiliate links up to date?

Are datafeeds the easiest route?

Are textlinks embedded in review articles, linking to affiliate products, the biggest headache? If so, what's the best headache remedy?

Total Noob Question: Other than clicking through on embedded textlinks how on earth do you keep track of a link's status, like "Does it go to the original deep link page or does it now default to the index.htm page"?

It seems to me that updating and keeping affiliate links up to date has to be one of the biggest headaches and drudgeries of the affilite marketer's life. Am I wrong? Is there a bigger headache - besides search engine updates? ;0)

[skibum]

Well, the JavaScript links available in CJ may help that. Data feeds, well if the whole feed is being pulled, then those should probably be updated once a week if possible.

For lots of affiliates, the easier thing to do is pick the most targeted links that aren't likely to change, category pages, the homepage, stuff like that. As long as they are targeted many of them can be left up in place for years. :)

[Webwork]

I've read about products that are link checkers and, if my memory serves me well, one product is "xenu".

I assume if one website features a significant number of embedded textlinks that a link checker that could index all onsite links on the basis of the root-URL could be programmed to keep an index of all the links and then run a query/bot to check if the links validate OR if they redirect or receive some form of error message.

Does such an affiliate linking checking product exist?

Would xenu or something akin to it - if configured correctly - do the trick?

[Marcia]

xenu checks for broken links, but that's not the case when a link starts to go to a homepage rather than a specific product. It also won't work when the link resolves to a page that says the link is no longer valid, for example when a merchant has been de-activated for back payments. What the kicker is, is that some links will continue to go to the merchant's pages even when their program has been discontinued.

Added:
I've got some product links to a merchant that *still* go to their site even though I have NOT been in their program for quite a while. It's a CJ link and I'm going though to find all of those now - by hand.

[edited by: Marcia at 4:53 am (utc) on Oct. 23, 2006]

[Tastatura]

I never really looked for any tools that do link checking, but I would guess they exist. One way of tracking inbound links in automated fashion can be done using "Yahoo Search Web Services - Site Explorer Inbound Links API" and a ‘script’ that compares current result against last one – that should be fairly trivial to do (one can get fancy and build more functionality to it as well…). Downside would be that you would be relaying onto what is in Yahoo’s index (i.e do they have all/correct data or not).

[LisaWeber]

I never found a satisfactory answer to this eternal question, and I got really sick of changing links again and again, so now I pre-sell almost everything. Meaning, if I mention a certain item within an article I wrote, I don't link directly to the merchant within the article. I write a review or information pre-sell page about the item and then I link to it within the article. That way, every time I need to make a change, I only change one page and all the articles that link to it are still valid. In doing so, I'm also adding just one more content page to my site, which I may or may not put adsense on. This probably lowers my conversion rate a bit, but I think adsense makes it up, and I think it's worth it.

Another thing I do is use server side includes. Like, if I want to include a link straight to the merchant, I will put it in a text file in my includes folder. I'll put the include command within the article(s), and then again, just one item to change instead of dozens or hundreds.

As for link checking, I'm thinking of having someone write me a program that actually keeps a database of a snippet of text on the linked page. When the bot returns to the page to check if the link is good, it will return an error if that snippet is no longer there or majorly modified. I also was thinking of having it trip a trigger if any obscene words were on the page -- I've had old links lead to porn pages before and I hate that.

[edited by: LisaWeber at 6:13 am (utc) on Oct. 23, 2006]

[hunderdown]

I'm with Lisa--minimize the number of places you have to update. I have started adding detailed book reviews to my niche information site. These are books I typically mention in several places around the site. I then need to check/update only the one page.

For those who are Amazon Associates, there is a free service via Alexa that will check Amazon links for you. I haven't used it in a while, but I think there are limits to the number of links it will check at any one time, but if you have a page with a lot of book links, it's definitely a time-saver.

[greenleaves]

For checking links: Manually

For keeping aff link order: Dreamweaver Libraries