503 Service Unavailable – Amazon affiliate links

  • Resolved techforaging

    (@techforaging)


    4 years, 11 months ago

    There is an older post related to this but it is closed.

    These “errors” have been appearing recently. At first it seemed that if I dismissed them all would be okay. But a couple of days ago, after having dismissed two I later noticed the links had the line-through. BLC was not reporting the 503 error. I searched for them, did a recheck, and that cleared the line-through.

    My site is just getting started and will be having many more of the Amazon affiliate links so it may become a more serious problem. I have changed the frequency setting from 72 to 24 hours. Is there anything else I should consider doing? Thanks.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by techforaging.
Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Plugin Support Williams – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudev-support8)

    Hello @techforaging

    I hope you’re well today!

    The problem with Amazon affiliate links is that apparently to check them we would have to use Amazon’s Marketplace API. Otherwise Amazon servers are simply rejecting connections (these “checks”) that are about to resolve and validate the links.

    So, that would require API connection which isn’t currently supported by the plugin. There was similar issue reported here some time ago, indeed, and our developers were already made aware of the case but I’m afraid I can’t give you an ETA on when this will be implemented. We’re looking into it.

    What you could do to avoid the “flood” of those errors/warning though would be to add those links to exclusion list.

    On “Settings -> Link Checker -> Which Links To Check” page, at the bottom, there’s an “Exclusion list” box. I believe that those Amazon affiliate links do have some string/some part in common – so you can put such word that is common to all of them in that exclusion list and Broken Link Checker should simply ignore them for now, while still checking other links on site.

    Kind regards,
    Adam

    Thread Starter techforaging

    (@techforaging)

    Thanks for the reply. I may need to find another solution. The most important links on the site are the Amazon affiliate ones and the reason I use the plugin is to keep the links up-to-date when product links are truly broken by Amazon. Just now I scrolled through the All list of links and found/fixed 22 with the 503 code.

    Hello @techforaging,

    I hope you’re doing well!

    I’m afraid as Adam mentioned in the above thread, this will require integration with Amazon’s Marketplace API. I’ve forwarded this feature to our developers, so it would be added as a feature request.

    Have a good day and take care!

    Cheers,
    Nastia

    Thread Starter techforaging

    (@techforaging)

    If there was an option to ignore 503s I would set it.

    Or let me ignore certain sites like Amazon.com and Hotels.com so that the tool does not keep disabling my revenue links.

    Thread Starter techforaging

    (@techforaging)

    I’m thinking of making a change to line 120 of modules/checkers/http.php

    $good_code = ( ( $http_code >= 200 ) && ( $http_code < 400 ) ) || ( 401 === $http_code ) || (503 === $http_code);
    return ! $good_code;

    Plugin Support Dimitris – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudev-support6)

    Hello there @techforaging

    If there was an option to ignore 503s I would set it.

    I’m not sure about the implementation so I added a new feature request about it.

    Warm regards,
    Dimitris

    Thread Starter techforaging

    (@techforaging)

    I made the code change and now I don’t need to manually “not broken” all the 503s that frequently appear.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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