If you have been following our ongoing saga (Part 1, Part 2) of Amazon’s keywords requirements, you’ll know that change is normal. Well, we have now heard that things are changing again. The newest information is:

“Amazon ingests up to 210 bytes globally (with the exception of CN and JP marketplaces, which ingest up to 800 bytes) for subject keywords. Everything beyond this limit and up to 2000 bytes is not used. If more than 2000 bytes are provided in subject keywords, the entire ONIX record will be disregarded.”

This is a significant change from the earlier statement that Amazon would ignore all of the keywords if more than 250 bytes were sent. Now, the accepted byte limit has been lowered to 210, but at least they will truncate the keywords for you automatically.

If you are using Eloquence on Demand, you don’t have to worry about this limit at all, as the Title Management Keywords field has a 1500 character limit, well below the 2000 byte maximum.