Crazy Decision By Toys-R-Us

[Frostie]

Presume most have now seen this email sent out lastnight;

Hi,
IMPORTANT: CHANGES TO THE TOYS R US PROGRAMME

A quick alert to inform you that Toys R Us are launching a brand new website - imminently!
This is due within the next 3-5 days; unfortunately I cannot give you a definite date at present as there are a few last minute tweaks and tests being completed.

Notice will be sent once confirmation is received, this will also explain how the tracking links will change.
As the new site will have different URLS for product and category pages, any current deep links will need to be amended as they will no longer work.

Default links will be fine, as will links from within the product feed, as these will be amended by Affiliate Window. If you are using the feed you will simply need to refresh it.

Full details will be sent within the next communication, if you have any concerns please get in touch.

Why oh why do merchants do this? Its bad any time of year, but now there are hundreds of affiliates with Christmas sites that deep link to products who have to go an manually make changes.

Why dont they put .htaccess in place so automatic redirects take place as mentioned in Mr Bonds blog only yesterday?

[aaclapham]

Luckily I shuffled my cards and I am not using them, as I would have to be back peddling rather than pushing forward :td

[monkeyman]

Just spotted this in my inbox and can't believe they're doing it now - 7 weeks before Christmas.

I'm the same as Andrew and I'm using other merchants this Christmas so luckily not got much to change and won't be replacing them.
Just spotted the links down the bottom of the Toys R Us site too, nice to see them pushing other things.

The email was a bit vague too "within 3-5 days". Any ideas as to when it's changing?

[Elaine]

ToysRus came up against the 'onlypromotedecentpayingprogramsrus' - so thankfully don't have to spend time changing links

[monkeyman]

Just checked Toys R Us and they're doing their planned maintenance now.

Not sure how long it's planned for, but anyone promoting them will have a very quiet day indeed!

[sgpratley]

It might be a good time to promote them though if you can get a new feed-based site up quickly, their SEO landing pages are basically shagged as a result. Another reason why they should have implemented some sort of redirects.

A quick search for one of their products brought this link back in Google:

http://www.toysrus.co.uk/Product.asp...579?ref=117315

[Darren M]

Presume most have now seen this email sent out lastnight;


Why oh why do merchants do this? Its bad any time of year, but now there are hundreds of affiliates with Christmas sites that deep link to products who have to go an manually make changes.

Why dont they put .htaccess in place so automatic redirects take place as mentioned in Mr Bonds blog only yesterday?

Maybe they took your advice, some of the old links were still working this morning after the site update, but I noticed they've lost some of their generic higher PR pages. Even their home page has dropped to PR0.

By the way, Gamestation have also been making some changes that have resulted in a lot of broken deep links. Their product feed is also affected, all of these links appear to be broken.

[jumbocruiser]

Yes gutted by this. Made a nice little profit last year and thought I would do 2 or 3 sites on it. Nicely built and ready to watch the cash roll in and BANG.

All those links are now knackered and probably all the cookies from the recent pick up in visitors we have been seeing. We use the aw product id for the index for each product and of course all 8,000 of those have now changed too so i can't even update my awin links!!

I can't believe how big companies like this come up with ideas like this. How many thousands of broken links from voucher codes, directories and everything else will there be scattered across the internet after they have finished.

Plus to boot there site isn't even working now. On a positive note, there site was crap before so after a brief look i had today it looks a bit better.