You may need to find links within your site if a site whose affiliate program you take part in updates its link structure. For example, you used http://www.your-aff-link.com?a=me, but now you’re supposed to use http://www.your-aff-link.com?a=moi. If your don’t update your affiliate links, you just won’t be paid for your referrals. Long story short, you need to find all your affiliate links and update them so that they have the correct structure (i.e with ?a=moi). If you don’t have that many of them (affiliate links), you can find and update your affiliate links manually. Problem is, it may get pretty daunting to do that if you have a deluge of affiliate links.
Especially if you never kept track of the pages where you placed your affiliate links. You can use Screaming Frog to make things by a long shot easier for you. As a sidenote for future use, be sure to keep track of all the pages where you happen to use affiliate links so that you can easily find them in the future.
How to Find Links with Screaming Frog
If you’re not familiar with Screaming Frog, be sure to check this post. Now that you know the basics of Screaming Frog (you’ve just checked post, right?), you want to roll up your sleeves and actually find your affiliate links. Here’s how it works:
1. Fire up your Screaming Frog app.
2. Specify your URL to spider.
3. Expand the Configuration drop down menu and Select Custom.
4. Enter the URL of the site you want to find links to.
Note that you can specify a few URLs that you want to find. Chances are, you use multiple affiliate programs.
5. That done, click OK …
6. And Start.
Depending on the amount of pages your site has, it can take you anything from a few minutes to a few hours to find your affiliate links with the help of the software.
Having found all the pages with your affiliate links, you need to update them so that they meet new requirements.
Bottom Line
As you can see for yourself, you can pretty easily find links within your site. Affiliate ones or not. With that in mind, it’s by far better to just keep track of all the pages where you place your affiliate links, Sure thing, if they’re sitewide, it’s ok to just have a list of such spots (for example, sitewide) rather than each blog post with that sidebar or what not.
Do you know any other way of finding affiliate links if you need to update them for some reason or other?
