[AffiliateHound]

Has anyone done this? Is it a good idea, or a bad idea? While some merchant links (such as Amazon) still go to the product landing page, thousands of mine now go to an error page.*

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What do you think?

*THIS HORRIBLE ERROR MESSAGE:

The link is not currently active.

There are a number of reasons that you may have received this message. The most common is that the merchant who was advertising is temporarily not-actively promoting that program. If, however, you feel you have reached this page in error, please let us know. Shareasale.com does not tolerate or send any SPAM mail to anyone. If you feel you have been targeted by a SPAM message, we would appreciate if you could forward the message to us at abuse at shareasale.com.

Shareasale.com manages the relationships between advertisers and affiliates, which is why you were directed to our site. Since the link that you clicked is not currently active, you were not redirected to the site.

If you are a new affiliate, your links will not be active until Shareasale.com gets a chance to review your account - you will receive an email when your account is approved and links are activated. This process generally takes around 24 business hours.

[gcarson]

IF that's a SAS error message on the links, I think you can have those invalid links redirect to a page on your site where you can show them a message you'd like rather than the standard SAS message shown.

[Convergence]

Not sure I'd do a disclaimer.

Have you considered adding rules to your .htaccess file (providing you have an Apache server)?

Also, as discussed previously here on ABW, you can redirect offline SAS merchants elsewhere - we redirect them to one of our sites search results page.

Not knowing how many sites or different merchants you are having to deal with, just offering another suggestion...

[I.M.O.G.]

The former is definitely more visitor friendly than the latter. (more readable to the lay person - me)

If you are actually using the former, and you really want them to notify you, I would include a link that enables them to report the item to you. I wouldn't go through the trouble of composing an email to you, I'd probably just bounce back to google and go elsewhere. I might click a link in the error message to let the webmaster know about it before I left however.

Just my regular joe feedback.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by gcarson

IF that's a SAS error message on the links, I think you can have those invalid links redirect to a page on your site where you can show them a message you'd like rather than the standard SAS message shown.

The problem with that is that you can only redirect to one page on one site. I'd thus have several sites redirecting visitors to a different site. Not sure if that is a good idea. Also, the SAS description of the feature says it is for Temporary Offline merchants, thus it may or may not work for merchants from which you have been terminated.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by I.M.O.G.

The former is definitely more visitor friendly than the latter. (more readable to the lay person - me)

If you are actually using the former, and you really want them to notify you, I would include a link that enables them to report the item to you. I wouldn't go through the trouble of composing an email to you, I'd probably just bounce back to google and go elsewhere. I might click a link in the error message to let the webmaster know about it before I left however.

Just my regular joe feedback.

The "Email us" would be a link to an email message box.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by Convergence

Have you considered adding rules to your .htaccess file (providing you have an Apache server)?

Can't do that on my oldest, most affected sites (3 sites for which I had just begun 3 weeks ago doing total re-designs and moving into the 2010s - but even before the tax crisis, I anticipated it being a 4-week job for 1, 2-week for another, and 2, 2-1/2 month job for the largest site.)