Amazon Affiliate Warning Email

Hey guys,

Since nobody is too sure about anything relating to Amazon - not even their employees or their support forums - I decided to give it a shot here, since you're the most knowledgeable group out of all.

I just got an email warning from Amazon requesting a change to my websites. I either do them int he next 5 days or I get banned.

I've gotten one of these before and managed to stay safe (I had a plugin that was messing with the links with a noreferrer attribute). That was easy to fix due to the reason being clear. This one's different though:

-Your Site makes inaccurate, overbroad, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims about Products, the Amazon Site, our policies, promotions, or prices.

An example of the above violation can be found here:
mywebsiteexample.com/best-product-reviews/cheap/
mywebsite2.com/best-product/cheap/
Statement: Best/Cheap in relevance to the Amazon products.

What does this mean? I can't use the words "best" or "cheap" in the titles or inside the articles? It's utterly ridiculous. How is this innacurate or misleading? It's simply my opinion - "Top 10 Best X and Y" or "this is the best X you can get". If you can't use those words, then your vocabulary is severely restricted and nearly all affiliate websites will get shutdown since nearly all use the valuable keywords of "Best" and "Cheap".

Has anyone of you ever gotten a similar warning? Do you have any ideas on how to fix this? They're always so damn vague, being an Amazon affiliate is like walking in a minefield every day and praying you don't get blown up, even if you do everything EXACTLY as they want to. The operating agreement is so vague and extensive that they can take down anyone, at any time, for any reason.

Anyway, sorry for the semi-rant. Any help or ideas would be highly appreciated as being an affiliate is a huge part of my income, even if I started to diversify ever since the first warning about a year ago.

Thanks in advance.

I guess it has to do with word cheap.

I have seen almost all Amazon affiliate website using best word. So that should not be issue..

Try using aternative for cheap like budget friendly etc.

MisterXYZ said:

I guess it has to do with word cheap.

I have seen almost all Amazon affiliate website using best word. So that should not be issue..

Try using aternative for cheap like budget friendly etc.

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Hey MisterXYZ, thanks for the quick reply. I'm also leaning into that answer and can certainly replace all instances of "cheap" with "affordable" or "budget friendly" as you suggested. One question though - do you think I could just replace all instances inside the article and leave the URL intact? Because if I change the URL (from mywebsite2.com/best-product/cheap/ to
mywebsite2.com/best-product/budget-friendly/ for example), it would destroy my pages' rankings, even if I redirected. It's so idiotic that we have to pose these questions ourselves and find answers in grey areas, Amazon should have a much better compliance guide and straight answers instead of vague bullshit. Thanks again.

theduke60 said:

Hey MisterXYZ, thanks for the quick reply. I'm also leaning into that answer and can certainly replace all instances of "cheap" with "affordable" or "budget friendly" as you suggested. One question though - do you think I could just replace all instances inside the article and leave the URL intact? Because if I change the URL (from mywebsite2.com/best-product/cheap/ to
mywebsite2.com/best-product/budget-friendly/ for example), it would destroy my pages' rankings, even if I redirected. It's so idiotic that we have to pose these questions ourselves and find answers in grey areas, Amazon should have a much better compliance guide and straight answers instead of vague bullshit. Thanks again.

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I agree with @MisterXYZ and if you are ranking for the terms all which contains the word cheap then you will loose the spots after redirects otherwise no problem.

This rule is called don't give any promisses that you can't keep. So you can't quaranty that the product is the best or the cheapest. But i'm sorry that it brought problems for you. And for sure these rules are making lots of promlems all the time.

Thanks for the replies guys. Last thing I'm doing before making those changes is wait for a reply from Amazon's support. I'll keep you all updated and post results as I'm sure that in the future, someone else in my position will appreciate having some guidance. As always, you guys are the best.

Removing word cheap from url and content will definitely impact SEO ranking.

But what will you do with that traffic if your Amazon account gets banned.

Hey guys, a quick update. I still haven't received a reply from my email to the compliance but I did have a live chat with Amazon Associate's support and after explaining everything and sending them the warning email they decided to take a look at it. After a few minutes they came back to say this: "Even though the audit team is separate from ours, I've found no problems at all with your websites. I recommend that you send them an email asking for clarifications."

Fantastic, isn't it? Not even they know what's wrong. I guess I'll have to wait for that email's reply. I'll keep you all posted as promised.

Sounds really strange to me as well. "Cheap" is subjective word it can mean 10$ and it can mean 10000$ depending on what you are talking about so I don't see how you can be deceptive about that.

Keep us updated.

yesofcourse said:

Sounds really strange to me as well. "Cheap" is subjective word it can mean 10$ and it can mean 10000$ depending on what you are talking about so I don't see how you can be deceptive about that.

Keep us updated.

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It really is strange, if that's a new rule for "best" and "cheap" lists then nearly all affiliate websites would need to be taken down. Still no answer from Amazon's Associate support (live chat said that it can take around 3 to 4 days, which is disturbingly close to the 5 day limit to reply to the warning saying you've fixed everything).

I contacted a highly active expert member of the Associates forums and not much luck there, I got a reply but they're just as mystified as we are, stating only that maybe websites that are built solely with an Amazon Affiliate focus are taking higher scrutiny now. Still not sure how to proceed.

My plan of attack as of right now is to 1) Add a sitewide associate disclaimer on the top of articles instead of the bottom. 2) Possibly remove all the "cheap" lists (remove all amazon links but leave the articles up so I don't lose much rank), since the "cheap" ones are seemingly the bigger problem. 3) Pray to God that it works or years of hard work and thousands of dollars of investment are going down the drain.

Since the auditors are people and not robots, I'm willing to bet this auditor has found a problem (in his opinion) that doesn't exist and other auditors would probably not consider using those words an issue. My best hope is to do something to get past this review and hope that whenever in the future I get reviewed again, it's by someone else that has a different point of view. I'm not breaking any rules or compliance, nor was that ever my intention.

Again, I'll keep you guys posted - have yourselves a great day!

Any update?

Mister Frog said:

Any update?

Click to expand...

Hey, not much so far. This is what's new:

• Still no reply from the email I sent Amazon Associates support.
• Did a marathon of small changes to hundreds of articles to "fix" them as best as I could. I will detail these changes soon in an extensive post.
• I deleted every single link on the "cheap" lists - titles, images, tables, everything - until I have time to rewrite them so they fit compliance perfectly (what I must specifically change to do this, I still don't know. Hoping that their reply sheds some light on this). I'll certainly feel a drop in earnings due to this but I think it's a must-do for now in order to survive.
• Already sent my reply to their warning, detailing all the changes, since yesterday was the last day to do so.

As soon as I have some more breathing room I'll give you a detailed list of everything I did. I'll also update you guys on the situation - what they replied, how my account ended up in the end, etc...

In the end, even if everything goes right and I "win", there's one golden lesson to learn here - for myself and for all of you reading: Don't keep all of your eggs in one basket. Or, as Wu-Tang Clan clearly put it:

Diversify.

Hope you're all having a beautiful weekend and staying safe. As always, I'll keep you all updated.

any update?

Your Site makes inaccurate, overbroad, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims about Products, the Amazon Site, our policies, promotions, or prices.

Click to expand...

I have a different opinion on this one, they may refer to misleading or deceptive claims of what you can do with that product from amazon.
As an example:
Title - 5 Best knife to use outdoors
Content - You can use the XX knife to cut wood

It is obvious you can't cut a log with a knife, but you can use it to cut a wooden stick for example, i think this is what they meant.
Maybe you interpreted this wrong?

Anyway keep us updated with their reply.
Cheers

nSnoopy said:

I have a different opinion on this one, they may refer to misleading or deceptive claims of what you can do with that product from amazon.
As an example:
Title - 5 Best knife to use outdoors
Content - You can use the XX knife to cut wood

It is obvious you can't cut a log with a knife, but you can use it to cut a wooden stick for example, i think this is what they meant.
Maybe you interpreted this wrong?

Anyway keep us updated with their reply.
Cheers

Click to expand...

I thought about this as well but I was already very careful with those type of claims from the getgo and when they specified "Best/Cheap in reference to Amazon products" I knew that the problem had to be with the more broad statements such as "This is the best X on the market" or "This cheap X is etc..."

Time for a big update:

I've just received a "thank you for your cooperation email" and the warning message is gone so I'll assume that I'm safe. Extremely relieved.

Let's break down what I did in order to successfully jump this dangerous hoop:

• Every single claim of something being "the best" was reinforced by a statement such as "in my opinion", "in my view", "from our standpoint", etc.. Example: "this is the best X you can get" ---> "this is, in my opinion, the best X on the list". This took me ages since I have hundreds of articles but it makes sense, they don't want you to make statements that aren't factual so you've got to reinforce that they're not a fact, just an opinion.
• Added a prominent Amazon Affiliate disclosure on top of all pages - "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases." I already had one at the bottom but due to the recent FTC push, it's best to have it on top.
• Double-checked to make sure that all articles that focused on a budget level (such as Top Products under $1000) actually had all products under the mentioned price level. If you have a product that's above that price on this type of lists, you can get banned for "misleading" claims. This applies to discounted prices too so always guide yourself by a product's base price, not the discounted one.
• Disabled every link - image, tables, text links, buttons - on all the "cheap" pages. Still don't know for sure how to rewrite them properly so I'll be asking Associates Support to get some guidance. Only after that will I re-enable the links.

What a week it has been. Glad that this is finally near its end, just need to contact support to get some specific guidance on how to deal with the "Cheap" articles/lists and it'll be all done.

I'll keep you all updated and make another post when they answer the email about the "cheap" articles.

Until then, thanks for all the help and have a great week.

I know how scary and frustrating this can be. It seems like we're always vulnerable to what mood some bean counter might be in on a certain day. This takes me back to google's panda/penguin changes years back. I had an authority site with over a 100 articles I'd written myself and suddenly my rankings were all gone. Overnight! Goodle admitted that some very good sites were included "accidentally" but they never restored my rankings. There are endless examples of this but you just have to keep working and hoping for the best. Good luck in the future.

theduke60 said:

Hey MisterXYZ, thanks for the quick reply. I'm also leaning into that answer and can certainly replace all instances of "cheap" with "affordable" or "budget friendly" as you suggested. One question though - do you think I could just replace all instances inside the article and leave the URL intact? Because if I change the URL (from mywebsite2.com/best-product/cheap/ to
mywebsite2.com/best-product/budget-friendly/ for example), it would destroy my pages' rankings, even if I redirected. It's so idiotic that we have to pose these questions ourselves and find answers in grey areas, Amazon should have a much better compliance guide and straight answers instead of vague bullshit. Thanks again.

Click to expand...

May be you change canonical tags of the urls as www.example.com/best-product and index all urls with that canonical. Once all urls with good traffic are indexed and rankings are intact you can implement redirections on rest which are not ranking that great.
Just a suggestion rest upto you.