One of the problems with earlier Amazon programs was that you had to sign up separately with Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de etc. Has that complication been removed? |
No. Which is my pet hate. Even the SOAP APIs are different... |
No they didn't. If they could make a single login for all those and if they could redirect aStore users based on IP that would be really great |
Someone who wishes to remain anonymous here emailed me this (my translation from German). He said it's an interesting article and adds a caveat:
<<It would be very interesting to show the other side to this. aStores are also the "best pratice" for all the spammers who litter Google search results, even when it comes to highly competitive search terms:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=geschirrsp%C3%BCler [dish washer]
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=kaffeemaschine [coffee machine]
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=grill
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=digitalkamera (8th rank! no child's plax for the query "digital camera")
The reason for this is that every spammer can use the trust of the aStore subdomain to then fire 1000s of links towards his shop.
(http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A//astore.amazon.de/kaffeemaschinen-guenstig-21+-site%3Aastore.amazon.de)
My intent here is not to disclose the spammer, but I can see a political problem between Amazon/ Google. aStores in just some weeks will occupy all attractive terms. Will Google punish them for that? With every new link, the spammers make this subdomain even STRONGER. And frankly, none of these shops offer any additional content compared to Amazon.
Whatever the case may be. I'm watching the progress of this with some interest. My gut feeling is that Google will tolerate this for much too long, which is bad for the SEPRs quality :(>> |
That's old story already Phillip :). I had myself a boost in ranking benefiting from the link from the aStore. In the first months I had like 40k pages indexed by Google.
But apparently something went wrong (read spammers) and Google started punishing Amazon's aStore by removing lots of the pages from the index.
Amazon saw the danger in that and did the only thing available to them: added a nofollow link on the aStores on the links added by the affiliates |
aStores are now extremely SEF (I have provided feedback on that too during the BETA) and is true that most of them rank pretty well, benefitting also from the trust of the core domain |
it's not about the link FROM the astore. and it is not about astores being SEF. it's only about exploiting the trust of the subdomain. |
Yes I got that (a litlle after I pushed submit :)). But as I said the SERPs are being cleaned already. |
they are clean for the US? ok, then we might have high hopes for Germany....
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Besides the aStore feature for Amazon Associates, the Omakase Links seem to be pretty interesting. I first saw them on a friends blog. The Omakase links will actually read any Amazon cookie that you have on your computer. So the product links I saw on my friends site were all related to the last cd searches I had performed on Amazon the day before.
A small blurb about these links on Amazon:
http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/links.html |
