Disclosure and compliance

Some of this is legally required, and some of it is what keeps an Amazon Associates account alive. None of it is optional, and this page explains why.

Affiliate disclosure

An affiliate disclosure is on by default on every account.

The FTC requires that a reader can tell a paid link is a paid link before they click it. Amazon requires it too, and enforces it. "Nobody has complained" is not a defence, and the first time it matters is the day somebody complains.

You can edit the wording, and set different wording per site. What you cannot do is have no disclosure at all through a setting we provide.

Every link is marked

Every link AffyLink adds carries rel="nofollow sponsored".

sponsored tells search engines this is a paid link. Not marking paid links is something Google explicitly asks you not to do, and getting it wrong risks the organic traffic your affiliate income depends on.

We never add anything to your affiliate URLs for Amazon

Your Amazon URL goes out exactly as you gave it to us.

Amazon's operating agreement prohibits attaching identifiers that could track an individual user through an affiliate link. So AffyLink does not — not a session id, not a user id, not a click id, nothing.

Where a network does support it — ShareASale, CJ, Impact, Awin, Rakuten, ClickBank — we can attach that network's own SubID parameter, because that is a documented, supported feature of those programs. Amazon is not one of them and never will be.

Amazon Tracking IDs

Amazon lets you have up to 100 Tracking IDs, and you can use a different one per site. That is Amazon's own supported way of telling traffic apart, so AffyLink supports setting one per domain.

It gives you coarse attribution — which site earned what — inside Amazon's own reporting, without breaking any rule.

Links are not disguised

The link points at the destination URL. A reader can hover it and see where it goes, and it is marked as sponsored.

We do not offer link cloaking that hides the destination. Making a paid link look like an editorial one is exactly what the disclosure rules exist to prevent.