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Sunday, February 8, 2004

Amazonn, Amazn, Ammazon? Cheating With Amazon Affiliate Links

Are you looking for Amazon.com books?


Amazon.com

The following article discusses Amazon.com misspellings and how money is made with those.

... Ammazon? Tricky Content

Now here’s a trick I just realized might be possible and then I found it’s already being used online. If you have an Amazon Affiliate link, you get a percentage of everything bough when people follow that link to Amazon.com. Instead of building up a credible book site you might also just cash in on misspellings of people who want to type “www.amazon.com”. Because some browsers will instantly forward to a search engine on any sites which can’t be found. Which means if you type “www.amazo.com” or “www.amazn.com”, then you might get an instant Google search for those phrases. And all a webmaster now has to do is link to Amazon using these keywords and his page might be the access point for many shoppers.

All of the following “Amazon” misspellings have the page of the same guy using his affiliate within the Google top 10:

When I checked on this guy’s URL, Google revealed there’s about 13,500 pages indexed on “www.xs4all.nl/~sotty. The pages seem to be automatically generated though they all have an HTML file extension. And within those pages, a lot are just sitemaps of Amazon products, complete with link encoded with the associate id “casualmtg-20”. (There’s eBay links there as well.) The average PageRank of those files are not too bad either.

Or: Reserving Domains

Next I tried misspellings of the domain to see who registered them. Here’s the result:

Amazon Domains
www.amazonn.comNot reserved
www.amazn.comNot reserved
www.ammazon.comNot reserved
www.amazzon.comCasino Spam (Ownbox.com/ Euroseek.com)
www.amazoon.comE-Pharmacy Spam
www.aamazon.comSame Casino Spam
www.amaazon.comSame Casion
www.aazon.comPortal

Could it be these webmasters figured out an easy way to get a nice monthly income? I will let you know if someone actually bought at Aamzon by following above link from my blog!

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