Would you use this tool?

[maxkay]

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Hi folks,

I'm getting fed up with deeplinks changing on merchant sites & then finding out later on... I was thinking about making a tool that just shoots me an email if a URL changes. Is this something anybody else would be interested in?

Max

[robryan]

I think the tool, if you can pull it off is a good idea and something many affiliates would use. The problem I see though is that it would be hard to build something that scales to all merchants. It is pretty easy to create something that will check a specific merchant, but different merchants do different things, such as saying x product could not be found or redirecting to a category/ front page/ another product. Redirects would be easy to spot, but content changes without one would be hard.

Also checking would require you to make a page request to every deep link which would quickly run into a lot of requests when you got customers (although that is by no means impossible, something like SEOmoz does it).

Good luck though if you do try to implement something, in the past we have just used a drop in a conversion rate as a way to see which deeplinks might no longer be current. Something more direct would be good.

[lufc]

I'm sure most affiliates would be but obvioulsy it would depend on cost, usability and how well it works