Before you start sprinkling affiliate links all over your Magento store, there are some important things to think about. When you join an Affiliate program, you know that Amazon reserves the right to ban you any time. Yes, the Amazon Associates program policies asserts a right to ban you - even revoking all rights. So you can't violating the program policies.
Important information for Amazon Affiliates
Certain conditions and exclusions exist that may disqualify a purchase for earning advertising fees.
Operate More than One Account
In an effort to limit spam and make sure that their bans carry weight, Amazon only allows one account per individual. If you create more than one account, expect to get banned promptly. Even if your accounts have a separate e-mail address, different bank and EIN number. Amazon performance team will ban you becuase operating mutilple accounts.
It’s common for newbies to do this mistake. If you go ahead and create another account without closing out your first account, a ban is coming your way.
Newbies think of new accounts for new sites to keep track of the site’s earning. But you don’t need new accounts. You can create upto 100 tracking ID from a single account and use 1 Tracking ID for new sites.
Auto-Tag Amazon Sessions
Any use of automated scripts that attempt to take credit for Amazon shopping by artificially generating clicks or initiating sessions may result in immediate termination of an Associate’s account and withholding of outstanding advertising fees.
But some experienced affiliates have figured out methods to take benefit of this practice, and auto-tag visitors to make it look like a lot more clicks are coming in. Amazon may block those accounts that working with auto-tag users.
Violate Amazon’s Trademark Policy
The purpose of trademark law is to prevent consumer confusion. No matter how big your Affiliate site is, if Amazon thinks you are violate Amazon’s Trademark Policy your account will be banned. This American company owns a a bunch of of trademarks, not all of which have anything to do with the keyword “Amazon.”
The Amazon’s Trademark Policy prevents a competing business from opening up store using the same trademarked name in domain name. Patented products like Kindle are trademarked too, and you can easy violate these trademarks by including trademark words or phrases in website’s domain name. You can use trademarked name in permalinks, as it is one of the on-Page SEO factors that help getting ranked in search engines.
Placing orders for themselves
You will not purchase any products through your own Associates links for use by you or for resale or commercial use of any kind. (Associates Program Policies - 8.Content on Your Site)
You will not receive referral fees for such orders. Not using your Affiliate Link for items you purchase. This rule covers orders placed by friends and family.
Display Price in Amazon Operating Agreement
In most cases you may not otherwise include price information on your store. This is a policy violation and any time can drive thos affiliates to ban.
If you choose to show prices for any goods on your store in any “comparison” format together with prices for the same or similar products offered through another not-Amazon website, you must display both the lowest “new” price and, if Amazon API provide it to you, the lowest “used” price at which the item is available on the Amazon site.
Republish Amazon Reviews
You will not display or otherwise use any of our customer reviews for star ratings, in part or in whole.
An easy way to generate copy and bulk up the content on your site. However, don't copy customer reviews from Amazon website or pass them off as your own. Doing so would be a copyright violation. Just copy-paste will land you with a banned account quickly.
But Amazon’s terms of service give Amazon non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights to use product reviews on their website. If there’s a really good review at Amazon and you want to use it for your own marketing purposes? You can try to contact the reviewer directly and ask for permission to republish their review in your marketing materials. “Marketing materials” is a very broad term and can mean anything. It will help you if Amazon tries to accuse you of copyright infringement.
Affiliate Link Shortening
Amazon.com traffic is ranked #1 for Shopping and #19 Globally. Referral traffic adding value to rank of Amazon site. So the reputation of the Amazon depends on how affiliates are referring the site to users. They wants users to know where they are being directed to.
So you want to know if it’s OK to shorten affiliate links, specifically for use on social media. Amazon suggest using their amzn.to inbuilt shortener because they can verify it’ll track your clicks and sales correctly.
Buy Paid Search Placements
Amazon describe paid search placements as follows:
“Prohibited Paid Search Placement” means an advertisement that you purchased through bidding on keywords, search terms, or other identifiers. You may purchase paid search advertisements and submit links to Search Engines to appear in response to a general Internet search query or keyword (i.e., in natural, free, organic, or unpaid search results), so long as you comply with the Associates Program Operating Agreement and those paid or unpaid search results send users to your site and not directly, or indirectly via a Redirecting Link (as defined in the Fee Statement), to the Amazon Site.
While paid ads placement can make your site more visited and SEO visibility, it can also lead immediately to an affiliate account ban. You must be cautious while generating traffic for your store using paid ads. Also paid hits simply dont make purchases. The only way you get purchases on your store is by getting them yourself.
Additional recommendations
Use nofollow Affiliate links
It’s important to have your Affiliate links in perfect order.
Amazon bans link shortening that doesn’t make it obvious that you are sending users to Amazon. However, you can use Amazon’s default link shortener service, Amzn.to
Nofollow your links. All of the Affiliate links on your store should be nofollow.
Use optimal length of the post content
Product descriptions and images are undeniably crucial to online sales. The average length of product description is just between 350 and 400 words long. It should be sufficient to describe the main features and benefits of an item without under- or over-serving the visitor. After 750 words—or sometimes after only half that—you risk losing your reader’s attention. (Please check the article at Forbes.com - "How to Make Your Blog Get Real Attention"). Most never get read by more than a handful of people.
But there are always exceptions. At the one of the biggest Amazon Affiliate websites (thewirecutter.com) every single post is upwards of 3500 words, sometimes even over 9000. You can be guided for average length of the post by 1000 words.
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