Cleaning Up Your Amazon Links

Getting your Amazon link is fairly simple. Enter your book title in the search bar and click on your book. That will give you a link like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Princess-Petras-Mission-Pieyu-Adventures/dp/168187072X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485026526&sr=1-1&keywords=sir+princess+petra%27s+mission

The problem with these super links on Amazon is that everything that follows the dp/168187072X and especially after the qid is Amazon’s way of keeping track of the time you searched this book.

So, if you are sharing this long link to friends, family, or promotional pages and those people link in to that link, it show Amazon that a number of people searched the book at the exact same time, which is probably not the case.

If someone who linked into this long link ends up writing a review, Amazon raises it hackles (even if the person bought the book) and thinks that person is probably a family member or a friend because most people share the long link with them. Amazon has been getting very sticky about friends and family members writing reviews, and they may take down the review even if the review wasn’t written by a family member or friend and it is a legit review.

Here’s a tip to clean up the link. Just remove everything after the dp/168187072X so your link looks like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Princess-Petras-Mission-Pieyu-Adventures/dp/168187072X

or shorten the link more by taking out the book name like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/168187072X

You can also click on the email icon (to the right of your book) and it will give you an even shorter link http://a.co/ec7Tovw  I’m not a fan of this super-short link because it doesn’t say enough about where the links leads and it may be taken as spam.

Note: There are many articles online that recommend the use of super links and how these longer links help your Amazon rankings. A word of caution here; the longer links can possibly work to help your rankings, but only if you remove the qid part and the symbols/numbers attached to the ref part of the link. And recently, Amazon has caught on to people using this kind of revised-super link and they don’t necessarily like it, and that could mean trouble down the road.

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Diane is an international, multi-award winning children’s fantasy book author . Read more about her books here: https://www.dragonsbook.com  Sign up for the author’s newsletter here: https://dragonsbook.com/subscribe/