So my everything has been going great with Amazon and suddenly I received an email yesterday notifying me that my Amazon Associates account has been terminated. The reason they stated was:
"-Your Special Links are appearing as unpaid or sponsored links or advertisements on search engines or social media platforms and on the Amazon.com site. Per the Operating Agreement, (d) any Product purchased by a customer who is referred to an Amazon Site by a link that is generated or displayed on a search engine (including Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search portal, sponsored advertising service, or other search or referral service, or any site that participates in such search engine’s network) is a disqualified purchase."
The thing is, my special links have never appeared directly on any social network, search engine, email, or anywhere else besides my website (to my knowledge, which I am 99.99% sure about). All of the traffic to my Amazon Special links come from my website, which receives traffic primarily from organic and paid search. I've even reached out to the Amazon associates customer service over the past month to make sure that I wasn't receiving any disqualified or ineligible orders. I've been very careful to follow the rules and guidelines and avoid the pitfalls that have gotten many other affiliates banned from the program, so for me this is very confusing.
I reached out to them and told them all of this, that I have never displayed my special links anywhere but on my website, and that I am willing to provide a full audit of my adwords and google analytics accounts for full transparency. I also said that I have since carefully combed through the site and made sure we were as compliant as possible, and to please let me know if there is anything else I can do to further increase my level of compliance. No response yet, but I don't necessarily have high hopes.
So can someone tell me, what happened?
"-Your Special Links are appearing as unpaid or sponsored links or advertisements on search engines or social media platforms and on the Amazon.com site. Per the Operating Agreement, (d) any Product purchased by a customer who is referred to an Amazon Site by a link that is generated or displayed on a search engine (including Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search portal, sponsored advertising service, or other search or referral service, or any site that participates in such search engine’s network) is a disqualified purchase."
The thing is, my special links have never appeared directly on any social network, search engine, email, or anywhere else besides my website (to my knowledge, which I am 99.99% sure about). All of the traffic to my Amazon Special links come from my website, which receives traffic primarily from organic and paid search. I've even reached out to the Amazon associates customer service over the past month to make sure that I wasn't receiving any disqualified or ineligible orders. I've been very careful to follow the rules and guidelines and avoid the pitfalls that have gotten many other affiliates banned from the program, so for me this is very confusing.
I reached out to them and told them all of this, that I have never displayed my special links anywhere but on my website, and that I am willing to provide a full audit of my adwords and google analytics accounts for full transparency. I also said that I have since carefully combed through the site and made sure we were as compliant as possible, and to please let me know if there is anything else I can do to further increase my level of compliance. No response yet, but I don't necessarily have high hopes.
So can someone tell me, what happened?
