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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> Svpply and Pinterest both replaced/appended these affiliate ID's on any Amazon links saved on their platform.

Imagine ISPs doing something like that.

You can always bounce the links off of your server first to avoid this affiliate hijacking that Pinterest & others do. Post a link to a page on your server that has a javascript redirect to the affiliate page. This fools the Pinterest bot that follows shortened links looking for http redirects to affiliate URLs.

So dumb for not doing this.

I don't think this is allowed any longer on amazon and will probably get you banned. I'm not sure though

http://www.groovypost.com/news/amazon-associates-bans-url-sh...

Interesting. The bit that they are talking about is this:

"In addition, you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site"

First, your own server is (arguably) not a link shortening service as long as you don't offer that service. Second, if you were really worried about it, you could register a domain for your site called, for example, forwarding-you-to-amazon.com or fantastic-amazon-deals.com, link to it, forward from there. It seems to me that this would be compliant. That couldn't be any more clear that people are going to Amazon.com.

It's pretty common for sites to change referal links like this. I think the rationale is "my site, my bandwidth, my referral money." Can't argue with that!

Referly (now defunct), wanted to bring this kind affiliate money to everyone. http://www.businessinsider.com/referly-ceo-on-zombie-startup...

Not exactly the same, but I remember reading (likely on HN) about some ISPs serving adsense-filled pages in case the DNS lookup couldn't resolve the address.

Rogers in Canada used to do this. I'm not sure if they still do, though, because that incident alone caused me to switch over to another DNS server.

Funny, I get an error when I try to buy anything on Svpply.

http://www.saturdaysnyc.com/item/salt-1

Yeah, link rot was kind of our Achilles Heel.

I actually recoded the SaturdaysNYC frontend with Ginlane, around the same time I did this. Great team at that agency. http://www.saturdaysnyc.com/

As someone who operates a free service, this is a very unintrusive way to get some extra revenue and I wouldn't complain about it if you want to see these kinds of sites stick around :)

amazon would discontinue their account because the isp isn't providing value to them

Apples and oranges.

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