Amazon KDP Publishing: Removing Honest Reviews?!

About this video

Dale explains why Amazon KDP strips honest, organic reviews from book pages and how sharing ‘Super URLs’ causes it. A Super URL is the long link copied after searching Amazon for a keyword and clicking your book; it contains unique identifiers including the QID (a timestamp) and a book number. Because the chance of another person searching the same term at the exact same moment is near zero, Dale says Amazon’s system infers the buyer who arrived via that link is connected to the person who generated it, so any review they leave looks biased under Amazon’s community guidelines, which require unbiased reviews and bar friends and family. Removing the QID and book number doesn’t fully clean the link, he says, and high volume through such a link triggers red flags; he cites a Kindlepreneur example from Dave Chesson where coordinated low reviews through one link were all purged. He offers three safer methods: (1) share a clean link as shown in his earlier ‘dirty little secret’ video; (2) ask readers to search for your exact title on Amazon, which builds title relevancy and autosuggestions; (3) ask them to search a target keyword and find your book in the results, building keyword relevancy — both search methods cost some buyers who won’t do the extra work. His bonus tip: get an Amazon Associates account (you need a website with roughly 6-12 posts or pages), put it on a cheap, memorable, niche domain on WordPress, and share the Associates short link for your book so you earn a percentage on the book and on anything else the visitor buys; he says Amazon itself recommends Associates accounts to authors via Author Central.

Key takeaways

• Dale says reviews get removed when buyers arrive through Super URLs, because the QID timestamp and other identifiers let Amazon infer a connection between the link-sharer and the reviewer, making the review look biased.
• Stripping the QID and book number out of a Super URL does not fully clean it, and high traffic through one link can trigger a purge of the resulting reviews.
• Safer alternative one: share only a clean, stripped-down link to your product page.
• Safer alternatives two and three: have readers search your exact title, or search a target keyword and locate your book, to build Amazon relevancy — accepting that some readers won’t bother.
• Bonus monetization: an Amazon Associates short link on your own branded domain earns a commission on your book and on other purchases the visitor makes, and Dale says Amazon endorses this for authors.

Episode details: published April 25, 2019 · 10:25 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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