If you’re a user of Text-Link-Ads, you’ve most likely got an email waiting for you (if you haven’t opened it already) that will tell you that they’ve gone and changed the URLs for the affiliate links. What’s more, the old links will no longer work in 1 week. Talk about a prime example of why you should use redirects for your affiliate links.
I just spent a good half hour or so going through this site’s archives and changing my old affiliate link to my redirect. I hadn’t done that before because it hadn’t seemed like a prudent thing to do as the old ones still worked. Now, with the change, they all needed to be changed. Depending on the size of your archives, that could be one very large task.
Now, why would a large advertiser network such as TLA change all their URLs? Well, the reason that they use in the email is that the old ones were too long and they wanted to use tinyurl to shrink them down to a nice size. I suppose that’s a valid reason. I suppose that another reason could be that they want to eliminate some of the link/paid link bit pointing at them. Yet another reason could be the very same reason that many people use redirects in the first place. To hide the affiliate link. Many people are hesitant to click a link that has an obvious affiliate link in it.
Whatever the reason, here’s your heads up. Your old links will cease to work in one week. Time to look into redirecting. Perhaps I’ll do a little bit of a tutorial on that next week. We’ll see.
Added: If you want a quick way to change those links in wordpress, Sabahan has the SQL code for doing so.
Technorati Tags: text link ads, tla, affiliate, url, affiliate url, redirect, php redirect, tinyurl
About Shane Ede
It’s certainly a bit of a strange move on TLA’s part. I can understand introducing a nice short URL but why deactivate the old URLs as well?! Luckily I have my TLA set up on a subdomain redirect, but if I hadn’t then I’d be a bit miffed on having to change any links. It’s bad enough when an old post links to somewhere that doesn’t exist (especially when you’re the reader and want to see what was behind that link!).
I wonder how many people will seriously update their links, also what will happen with the old affiliate links? Will they just redirect to TLA without any referral. Most likely.
You might want to take a look at a plugin for wordpress I wrote that will let you manage those hidden affiliate links from one place in a nice web interface using ajax inside wordpress admin
Here’s the plugin page:
http://patchlog.com/wordpress/hidden-affiliate-links/