When your product listing suddenly gets taken down without any warning, then that means you have used restricted keywords in Amazon product listing. It happens when Amazon does a random sweep, basically when index your listings. This is so frustrating as you are selling this product for months and suddenly Amazon ban your product listing. If you are trying to get help from Amazon then the bad news is that they won’t help you out for this; in fact Amazon will also tell you that your product is now restricted. But for an Amazon seller it’s too difficult to identify the restricted keywords and there is no list for Amazon’s restricted keywords.

What Are Forbidden Keywords on Amazon?

There is no list available that a seller can refer for the restricted keywords as Amazon hasn’t published any list yet. But sellers can educate themselves by looking into the Amazon’s list of restricted products. There are some items that the list includes which are strictly prohibited by Amazon such as drugs and drug paraphernalia, but there are some items which are not that much obvious such as cosmetics and skin/hair care.

Here is a detail that we should look into, cosmetics are sold on Amazon all the time but still it is a restricted keyword why is that? Amazon restricts the sale of cosmetics to those who are new and not selling under their own brand or selling with manufacturer’s packaging. Also Amazon allows if there is no illegal drug or paraphernalia associated with the seller.

Here’s something you should know

First, let me share with you four basic rules that you need to follow to maintain Amazon’s guidelines.

1. The maximum number of characters including spaces is 200 that the titles must have.

2. Promotional phrases such as “free shipping”, “100% quality guaranteed” must be excluded from the titles.

3. Titles must not contain special characters, such as ~ ! * $ ? _ ~ { } # < > | * ; ^ ¬ ¦

4. Product identifying information such as “hiking boots” or “umbrella” must be excluded from titles.

If you search on Google what makes a title good then you will get more than 346 million results within 0.62 seconds.

But the problem is there are a few differing opinions on Amazon listing optimization.Even many new technology companies protect their strategies for listing optimization. For example let’s look into the two different Amazon product listings from the brand company HP (Hewlett Packard).

In the first listing, the title is taking a little more of a minimalist approach, so the brand hasn’t given that much info in their product title.

After they published a new listing on the same page, the title now describes more, based on what Amazon is looking in terms of an extensive description so that ranking is high.

Update Title on Seller Central

There is a common problem faced by many sellers, that when they update their titles in Seller Central, it perfectly shows up in the back-end but the new version of the title sometimes doesn’t appear on the actual product page. And if you haven’t received any error message, you don’t know how to fix the problem. In fact there are moments when you need to contact seller central support, and have the title changed. But as an Amazon seller it is important to identify if the actual issue is presence of forbidden keywords. And this is where the question comes in how you’re going to find the forbidden keywords that you have placed in your title?

Here are the simple steps you have to follow to identify the keywords forbidden by Amazon:

• Go to Seller Central and open that product listing.
• Click on Product Page Issue, and from there select FIX PRODUCT PAGE ISSUE
• Enter your ASIN and hit the search button.
• In this window, you will get to know what Amazon won’t accept about your title.
• This is a great opportunity for you to make the necessary changes and update your title.

This is an imagined title but it can give you an overall idea about the forbidden keywords and it offers Amazon sellers a great opportunity to make any changes while they are optimizing their listing.

If you want to succeed in your Amazon selling business you have to understand that this is a moving target, Amazon sellers who are continuously improving themselves with the fluctuations of Amazon’s wishes as well as the changes in the marketplace.

Fab On Go’s amazon human resource services can provide you with the assistance you need for running your store on the Amazon marketplace. You can find all the services required to grow and enhance your digital brand worldwide on a single platform. Our amazon human resources are multi-skilled and can efficiently handle different aspects of your store, right from providing analytical reports of your store to monitoring customer feedback.

Want to know more about our services? Just call us or email us for immediate assistance! Request a free consult this instant to avail our consultation or subscribe to our mailing list to get instant updates for Amazon seller/vendor central based processes.

If you need any professional help for your Amazon store management, get in touch with us at amz@fabongo.com.
Fabongo is a Vancouver, British Columbia based agency providing human resources to manage all things Amazon marketplace.

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