Hello David, it seems that my questions do not stop, hope you dont mind...
It happens that sometimes my merchants (by mistake obviously) send me items with the buy url that points to a non existent page on their sites.
There is no errors in the code of my site (those broken URLs is what I actually get in my xml!)
And obviously I can not click on every item that I get every day just to check if the link actually works, and contacting my merchants is not an option either as I am working with chain stores where no one seem to have any idea how to contact anyone who is actually running their websites, and that brings my question to the table:
Is there any automatic way to check if the products buy url actually works?
Any ideas are welcome!
Thanks a lot!
Paul
David, thanks for both of your replies, unfortunately dropping the problematic merchant is not an option as it is the biggest merchant in US in my niche and the second biggest one does not even have a product feed available, others are mostly resellers, or a very small stores with very limited merchandize, so not much can be done in that sense...
Anyway, thanks a lot for both of your replies (this, and the one about the htaccess), I will try to think more about how can I work around the problem.
Sorry, I meant the robots.txt not the htaccess...
Cheers
Paul
I have this idea to check for the jump URL landing page.
A config.php setting like JUMPDebug if enabled could show the landing page shown on the jump.php clickable but no auto-redirect. This way you can check if the problem is in your PT setup or the merchant landing page. This would also be a good idea if you have the appropriate website ID and merchant ID.
David, is this possible?
Sure -
If you add a new parameter, as you suggest to config.php, for example:
$config_jumpDebug = TRUE;And then in jump.php look for the following code on line 14:
header("Location: ".$product["buy_url"]);...and REPLACE this with:
if ($config_jumpDebug)
{
print $product["buy_url"];
}
else
{
header("Location: ".$product["buy_url"]);
}That should do the trick!
Cheers,
David.
Hello Paul,
From a technical point of view, unfortunately not i'm afraid. Whenever you come across broken links like this, it's worth checking that the product is still current, and if so giving the merchant (or the relevant affiliate manager) a call to let them know. If they don't fix it, then i'm afraid it's rather brutal solution but i'd recommend leaving their programme. If they're not making a technical or marketing effort why should you put in the effort to promote them?
At the end of the day, broken links are going to detract from the user experience of your site so even if you do get the odd few sales from them; looking at the bigger picture you would probably do better overall by not including them...
Cheers,
David.