So Many Broken Links from CJ Merchants

I was just looking over several merchants current links that they have in CJ as active but was surprised to find how many links lead to dead, broken and 301 pages. This is from a number of merchants so I would advise people to check the links as many are not working that are in the CJ get link pages. Shame on the people responsible, how do you expect us to make sales when your damn links are dead? You can find time to send those threatening get active emails but your too lazy to provide working links!

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Why doesn't anybody post the names of merchants with these complaints? It would help us all out to know what merchants have dead links, and what types of links they are. Have you contacted the advertisers yet about these links?

Joshua, I haven't contacted them, there was so many I just don't have the time for that. I would like to hear if others are finding them too, that is why I suggest you check links when adding new ones to see what page they lead to. I was surprised to see so many leading to dead pages and I just assumed that if they were on CJ with no signs of been inactive then they would work but that is not the case at all.

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Are these product catalog links, or normal links?

One thing to look at (or at least glance at) is link EPCs - Anything with $0 link EPCs can signal something might be up.

I haven't found any dead links out of the main programs I use, and none of my live links that don't result in much activity are dead.

These are just normal links and they include top merchants and brands and that is why I was surprised. If it was some hardly known merchant that doesn't update links often then it wouldn't be such a surprise. I don't want to start running off lists of names but one example is New egg, check out their banners that are listed under "free Shipping" and half of them were not working last time I checked.

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The links under "free shipping" that are dead all say " *** This promotion has ended. *** ", and list promotion dates. That'd be your main problem.

I see 2 dead links otherwise in NewEgg's banner section, both of which are product specific promotions they probably forgot to set dates on. The dead links are 10519499 and 10506338.

Ok I see, well there is no indication that these links have expired unless you click the name of the link on the Get Links Page which is what I presume you are working from (not the popup window from advertiser detail). When you select options (free shipping & banner) then select all of the links and select get html (like every other network offers) nothing is shown about the link has expired. So this means that each time we get links we have to open two pages, one to show if the link has expired or not and another to show the html code etc. I don't see the point of them even displaying the links that have expired especially if they only lead to dead pages? They also should indicate if the link has expired on the "Get Links Page". This is realy #$ annoying to say the least, now I have to open two pages everytime I get a link...

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Agreed. It's quite stupid for a merchant to send those links to a not found or offer expired page (with no other content on it) - Even if an offer is over, it should at least go to the main page or category page, with a note on it.

My experience is, Newegg links change their destination url frequently. So the old link text may describe a totally different product than the new url destination.
Even offers that show an exp. date, for example Feb. 10th, the link may change on Feb. 8th and go somewhere completely different.

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follow the money...

It's also other merchants, I just used NE as an example. I also thought about this more and you usually see the RED expiring notice on the "Get Html" link code page but for some reason it seems CJ have decided that they can trick us and show some and not others so we have to open up two pages now each time we want a link. I guess this means no more grabbing multiple link codes as you need to check each link detail anyway so you might as well just open each link code detail page one at a time and then proceed to get the code. Sometimes it makes you wonder what sort of idiots decide on such stupid time wasting procedures. Of course it would be a complete waste of time complaining to them and asking for them to fix this up to be more user friendly, you would have more luck talking to a brick wall.

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This is very annoying, finding so many dead links latley... here is my letter I wrote to them and I hope others will also get on their back. Who has time to click two pages for every link especially at this time of year?

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Merchants that are effectively managing their programs will expire links to coincide with the end of a particular promotion. While I agree the procedure on CJ's end is shaky, this is more an indication of a mismanaged account than anything else. That promo expired in 2008.

On the merchant side when we create a link with start/end promotion dates, it would make sense to have the ability to set the link to be removed from the interface (expired) at the end of the promotion. However there are reasons why not every promotional link should be expired. Sometimes merchants shift these out weekly and allow publishers to use Java based links so that their promotions will auto-update.

You might want to consider pulling coupon feeds as those always include the start/end dates for the promotions. I think your only solution for now when pulling manually is to actually open the text link so that you can see what the entire promotion is and subsequently the start/end dates.

I herd back from CJ and the people there and the good news is that this is going to be fixed in the near future.

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