bioneural.net

According to Mint, most of my blog visitors are American. To reflect this I decided to change my default Amazon Associates links from the UK to the US. In the process I got confused over the link syntax I should be using, but now have this sorted. For managing links to specific items on my site (automatically tagged with my Associates ID) I use Amazon Media Manager. AMM is a WordPress plugin that will randomly show a specified number of product links, categories of which can be matched to categories on your blog. AMM development is not active, however, it is easy to hack the plugin to use the more recent link syntax.

Which link to the Amazon homepage?

My links to the UK store (as indicated by the -21 in my Associates ID) looked like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home?tag=bioneuralblog-21&site=amazon

Unfortunately you can't use the same Associates ID for each store; it is necessary to apply for an Associates ID for each program individually. Your referral fees thus cannot be combined. In my first e-mail from Amazon US I was advised that this was my unique Amazon.com homepage linking format:

http://www.amazon.com?%5Fencoding=UTF8&tag=bioneuralnet-20

Soon after I received a second e-mail confirming my application had been approved, saying that this was my unique Amazon.com homepage linking format:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/bioneuralnet-20

I contacted Customer Support and was advised to use the following syntax:

http://www.amazon.com/?tag=bioneuralnet-20

Hence my confusion. Some more prodding and Customer Service explained:

All of the links track to your account. Some formats are not compatible with some web building programs, so we supply a variety of linking options... the [last] link is the newest format.

Syntax for linking to specific items

It's a similar story with links to a specific Amazon.com item. For example, the AMM v1.5 plugin generates links using this syntax:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192627058/bioneuralnet-20

However, Amazon.com advised me to use the following newer syntax to link directly to an item's detail page (although they prefer use of the Build Links tools):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/ref=nosim/?tag=your_Associates_ID

In this case:

• Replace ASIN with the 10-digit ASIN/ISBN of the product;
• The text "ref=nosim" is what allows your visitor to be taken directly to an item's detail page when the link is used;
• Replace "your_Associates_ID" with your Associates ID.

As for the syntax AMM uses although it still works, it isn't preferred:

The API plug-in you are using, is an older link format. This format is still tracked, but instead of building more links with the old format, the new format, which goes directly to the new servers, should be used.

We don't "retire" old linking formats, since it would be a burden to our many Associates to have to replace old formats with new.

Fair enough. So I decided to automatically convert all my links into the new format in one fell swoop. After-all, isn't this why I'm using an Amazon Media Manager, rather than doing it all by hand?

Hacking the AMM WordPress plugin

It's easy to update AMM to use the more recent link syntax. There is one line in two files to change (in version 1.5 of the plugin). The first is line 294 in amm.php. Change this:

return 'http://www.amazon' . $ext . '/exec/obidos/ASIN/' . $asin;

To this:

return 'http://www.amazon' . $ext . '/dp/' . $asin . '/ref=nosim/';

The second is line 362 in amm/amm_output.php. Change this:

return 'http://www.amazon' . $ext . '/exec/obidos/ASIN/' . $this->currentItem['amm_asin'] . '/' . $this->affiliate . '/';

To this:

return 'http://www.amazon' . $ext . '/dp/' . $this->currentItem['amm_asin'] . '/ref=nosim/?tag=' . $this->affiliate;

Job done. Confusion cleared.

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