How long until the hammer comes down on Amazon?

[redrubies]

I sell on Amazon and I have to disagree. Being on Amazon has increased our brand's image. There's instant credibility in the consumer's eyes for products being sold on Amazon. Remember, Amazon recently topped the customer satisfaction list... the public loves to buy on Amazon. If your product is on there, you get that reciprocal benefit.
Why wouldn't you sell on Amazon if you can keep your margins the same? Your volume of sales would continue to increase being in front of Amazon's traffic.

This is a rant. It's the redrubies hot button

Are you a Pro Merchant? If so, do you know that your brand's name will stay on Amazon forever? After you leave, your products, pictures, description pages, feedback, and about pages will remain on Amazon forever. If you're a Pro Merchant, then you are familiar with how a product is uploaded to Amazon. You are allowed to add about 30 keywords to each product. The keywords show up in Google's search as well as Amazon's search. Keywords like "red, big, girl, boy, man, woman,..." FOR EACH PRODUCT But the keywords do not show up on the product page. They are hiding keywords and google allows it. What if you put 30 random keywords on EACH product on your own website's store? Not only would it look stupid, but you would get penalized by google for keyword stuffing. What if you hid those keywords? You would get kicked out of the serps. How is that fair to everyone who has a small business? How is it fair to everyone who has a website for that matter? Amazon dominates every word in the dictionary with these methods. No one can compete with that.

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages of products on Amazon that say "currently unavailable." These pages come from merchants who have left Amazon. Amazon still has my jewelry that I sold in 2005 on their site that says "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." Currently unavailable??? My jewelry is unavailable to them forever. Affiliates are still directing these currently unavailable products to Amazon. Someone doing a Google search clicks on the product, sees it's unavailable, and puts something else in Amazon's search. I lose the sale. These currently unavailable products also show up in google images. Sometimes they show up in google's search at a higher placement than at the store that the product is being sold.

The New York Times wanted to do an article about Amazon's black hat methods. They are the biggest blackhatters on the internet and Google is letting them get away with it. Why wouldn't they? Amazon gives google 5 million dollars a month in adwords. I spent a long time helping the NYT and sending them tons of proof. They tossed the article with no explanation. The reporter would not answer me when I asked him why he changed his mind. He was very interested and then he just clammed up. Enter the Daily Dot. Second ones that wanted to do the article. The writer trashed the article and the story came out horrible. It was nothing like it was supposed to be. She left out all the black hat methods.

This is nothing against you. It's just my hot button and the subject raises my blood pressure. I would like to say something to you though. Although you are probably making a mint at Amazon (I know, I did too), selling there contributes to the downfall of small business owners, and everyone in cyberspace who has a website. It contributes to their downfall because Amazon is making money off you (20% of each product if you're a Pro Merchant). Blackhat tools are available to anyone who wants to use them. But keyword stuffing and hiding are not. Amazon's methods do not make for a level playing field. They do not deserve a dime of my money until google demands that they follow the same rules as everyone else.

 

[Kimi]

assphuck your spot on. Its the small businesses that are going to continue to get hurt.

Saying that tho could google end up cutting its nose of to spite its face?

Solution: create big businesses.

 

[Elitepinki]

this tuesdays at 13:37 the hammer will come down.

 

[kvmcable]

This is a rant. It's the redrubies hot button

Are you a Pro Merchant? If so, do you know that your brand's name will stay on Amazon forever? After you leave, your products, pictures, description pages, feedback, and about pages will remain on Amazon forever. If you're a Pro Merchant, then you are familiar with how a product is uploaded to Amazon. You are allowed to add about 30 keywords to each product. The keywords show up in Google's search as well as Amazon's search. Keywords like "red, big, girl, boy, man, woman,..." FOR EACH PRODUCT But the keywords do not show up on the product page. They are hiding keywords and google allows it. What if you put 30 random keywords on EACH product on your own website's store? Not only would it look stupid, but you would get penalized by google for keyword stuffing. What if you hid those keywords? You would get kicked out of the serps. How is that fair to everyone who has a small business? How is it fair to everyone who has a website for that matter? Amazon dominates every word in the dictionary with these methods. No one can compete with that.

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages of products on Amazon that say "currently unavailable." These pages come from merchants who have left Amazon. Amazon still has my jewelry that I sold in 2005 on their site that says "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." Currently unavailable??? My jewelry is unavailable to them forever. Affiliates are still directing these currently unavailable products to Amazon. Someone doing a Google search clicks on the product, sees it's unavailable, and puts something else in Amazon's search. I lose the sale. These currently unavailable products also show up in google images. Sometimes they show up in google's search at a higher placement than at the store that the product is being sold.

The New York Times wanted to do an article about Amazon's black hat methods. They are the biggest blackhatters on the internet and Google is letting them get away with it. Why wouldn't they? Amazon gives google 5 million dollars a month in adwords. I spent a long time helping the NYT and sending them tons of proof. They tossed the article with no explanation. The reporter would not answer me when I asked him why he changed his mind. He was very interested and then he just clammed up. Enter the Daily Dot. Second ones that wanted to do the article. The writer trashed the article and the story came out horrible. It was nothing like it was supposed to be. She left out all the black hat methods.

This is nothing against you. It's just my hot button and the subject raises my blood pressure. I would like to say something to you though. Although you are probably making a mint at Amazon (I know, I did too), selling there contributes to the downfall of small business owners, and everyone in cyberspace who has a website. It contributes to their downfall because Amazon is making money off you (20% of each product if you're a Pro Merchant). Blackhat tools are available to anyone who wants to use them. But keyword stuffing and hiding are not. Amazon's methods do not make for a level playing field. They do not deserve a dime of my money until google demands that they follow the same rules as everyone else.

You saved me a lot of typing. These guys that support Amazon and sell their products on there are delusional if they think for a second they're building a business or relationship with their customers. We get dozens of phone calls a week (because unlike Amazon merchants, we answer the phone) begging us for warranty and support from customers that purchased products on Amazon. We ask them who did you buy it from as we know all our largest competitors and NEVER have we heard a customer, not ONCE, name the company they actually purchased the product from. It's never happened. They all say the same thing, well Amazon. We tell them no, that's the marketplace but what was the seller's name? I don't know is ALWAYS the answer.

So if you for a second think you're building clients and a business selling on Amazon you're mistaken. Take Amazon out of the picture and I bet your business fails in less than a year. Your sales will drop immediately and you'll be back to square one just as if you opened your business today. Those customers you shipped to will ignore anything you have to offer if you're not on Amazon.

I learned this the hard way. I was a top eBay seller in my niche shipping over 200 orders a day when I started online. My warehouse was full of products, I had 19 full time warehouse employees with trucks arriving daily. We were growing at a rate of 28% a year. Our customer list comprised of more than 60,000 customers. We thought we knew what we were doing and although we had a website and funneled checkout through our website we were completely dependent on eBay marketing for business. I won't bore you with the details but one day T&S at eBay tossed all 3 of our PowerSeller accounts and took 13 days to even tell us why. We called our eBay rep only to be told it's a T&S issue, sorry we can't help you. In ONE DAY with a few clicks of a mouse eBay shut down our 5 million a year business. When they finally did speak to us they were complete jokers. Our feedback was over 99% on all three accounts and they said we needed to reach out to recent negative feedback customers and get them to revise their feedback. I couldn't believe wtf I was hearing.

That shit happened back in 2004 and I swore I'd never get back in bed with the devil. I will build my own brand, sell on my terms and build my customers that know who the fuk we are. They will know our store phone number, know our address and know our names. No longer will they know us as another eBay seller. Since that time we've established many great accounts and business relationships. We don't have any 3rd parties telling us how to run our business.

If you think you're building a business by selling on eBay or Amazon you're mistaken. I wish you luck.

 

[redrubies]

I view Amazon to online retailers as the the Super Walmart to B&M retailers. We get a phone call from Amazon about once a week begging us to list our products on their website. As a long time retailer and online marketer I learned the hard way the double edge sword of working your ass off to promote a 3rd party marketplace. Anyone foolish enough to list their products on Amazon only builds Amazon's brand and damages their own at the same time. eBay taught us this lesson 9 years ago.

I'll go out of business and start punching a time clock before I build Amazon any larger than they already are.

You're in my brain. I could have written that word for word.

 

[kvmcable]

I sell on Amazon and I have to disagree. Being on Amazon has increased our brand's image. There's instant credibility in the consumer's eyes for products being sold on Amazon. Remember, Amazon recently topped the customer satisfaction list... the public loves to buy on Amazon. If your product is on there, you get that reciprocal benefit.



Why wouldn't you sell on Amazon if you can keep your margins the same? Your volume of sales would continue to increase being in front of Amazon's traffic.

No I wouldn't because I would need to grow my business, increase my overhead to manage those orders and if Amazon gets a hair up their ass I have to immediately downsize. I've been down this road before, laying off very good, long term employees because I made a deal with the devil.

You're in a JV and if Amazon one day wakes up and says we don't need you anymore than you have a real mess on your hands. I've been there but will never be there again. It took me years to recover.

 

[redrubies]

kmvcable, I can't click thanks or give you rep. But oh my God. That last post you made. You described me with Amazon. Everything to a tee.

 

[Windmill]

How long do you think it'll be before Google turns it's attention to Amazon and it's BH heavy affiliate pages? Up to now they've seem to been given a free-pass to the point that they (along with eBay) rule the 1st page. But as Google moves forward they will either need to at some point reconcile their algorithm with Amazon.

Remember, nothing is set in stone in SEO. I feel this one coming someday.......

Amazon will be written into their algo, they are huge enough, so that they can get away with a lot. But non-amazon pages that are affiliate sites for them will and do get the hammer. If they've moved up in your niche, its probably just a coincidence.

 

[phpbuilt]

Amazon is there to stay. It makes sense to distinguish what type of interaction you're having with Amazon because there are several different concepts here that are all getting jumbled into one thread.

1) You have your own unique products that you sell, and you want to put them on Amazon.
2) You have your own products that you sell, but you are a reseller (not original manufacturer) and Amazon already has those products on them anyways.
3) Affiliate just linking to Amazon to sell products.

1 ... You're crazy to stick your unique products on Amazon. They will begin outranking you for your own products. That problem will haunt you even if you decide to leave Amazon later.

2 ... If Amazon is already ranking for various products, then becoming just another distributor that sells on Amazon is actually a good idea. If Google is going to favor Amazon in the SERPs anyways, and people are going to Amazon anyways, you might as well make some profit off it.

3 ... If you're an affiliate linking to Amazon, of course you can make great money at it. If you can source an affiliate that pays better than Amazon, do it ... if not then send your traffic to Amazon. Just make sure you're not doing something crazy like putting a do-follow link to Amazon (preferably you're cloaking it, or redirecting it somehow that Google doesn't know you're linking to Amazon).

 

[tmark30]

so many persons are dissatisfied with google dictatorship, but we are the ones who give google its influence. In my experience google search results are not always better than bing's but still we flock to google everytime we need to make the simplest query and by so doing further entrenching it dominance.

 

[dragonrage01]

so many persons are dissatisfied with google dictatorship, but we are the ones who give google its influence. In my experience google search results are not always better than bing's but still we flock to google everytime we need to make the simplest query and by so doing further entrenching it dominance.

google is so much better than Bing. For example, if I look for movies to watch and I go to bing, I will see tumblr, webs, and web2.0 sites that are meant to be passing link juice to the main site. A lot of time can be wasted if you are searching for something while using Bing or Yahoo. For people who do not use the computer often, they will definitely go to the best search engine to save themselves frustration.

 

[ShadeDream]

This is a great thread, it should most definitely be a sticky or something that everyone who's in IM reads about. My rep and thanks have disappeared for the day but I will come back.

 

[backtomakemoney]

next time someone from this forum comes here to say that he will be in some convention and will be able to ask matt cutts a question... he should remember this fantastic post (redrubies) and ask him why he allows this to happen.

 

[ShadeDream]

next time someone from this forum comes here to say that he will be in some convention and will be able to ask matt cutts a question... he should remember this fantastic post (redrubies) and ask him why he allows this to happen.

IMO forget Matt Cutts exists.

 

[Hierarchy]

Bottom line... If you cant beat them, join them..

 

[assphuck]

Who knows, Amazon may not need Google one day. Read: Amazon Inks $600 Million Deal with the CIA

I know some people think I'm off my rocker, but Google is poised to enter the national defense area as well. With the threat of nation sponsored cyber attacks/hacking, I'm sure we will see many of these big 800lb gorillas find new revenue streams paid in full with our tax dollars. Such relationships will make it far more complex for governments to pursue legal actions against those who they have partnered with.

 

[Jouster]

I think Google needs Amazon at this point. If Amazon was flushed out of Google's SERPS, shoppers would quickly learn to visit Amazon first and bypass Google altogether. That would devalue Google's role and importance in product based search queries.

So true...

 

[dragonrage01]

1) You have your own unique products that you sell, and you want to put them on Amazon.
1 ... You're crazy to stick your unique products on Amazon. They will begin outranking you for your own products. That problem will haunt you even if you decide to leave Amazon later.

This is not true at all. If you look at acne scar treatments in Amazon, the top selling items come from companies that are unknown. They have unique items or brands. By the looks of it, these companies will not be selling anything at all if Amazon does not exist. If I see those items in a website and not in Amazon, I will not even buy it but since it is in Amazon people like myself are more likely to try it.

 

[Scritty]

How long do you think it'll be before Google turns it's attention to Amazon and it's BH heavy affiliate pages? Up to now they've seem to been given a free-pass to the point that they (along with eBay) rule the 1st page. But as Google moves forward they will either need to at some point reconcile their algorithm with Amazon.

Remember, nothing is set in stone in SEO. I feel this one coming someday.......

I visit amazon all the time - never through Google unless I actually type the EM in. Most of the time it's bookmark.

Love to see the direct v's referred traffic stats for Amazon (the real FULL ones)

Scritty

 

[ShadeDream]

This is not true at all. If you look at acne scar treatments in Amazon, the top selling items come from companies that are unknown. They have unique items or brands. By the looks of it, these companies will not be selling anything at all if Amazon does not exist. If I see those items in a website and not in Amazon, I will not even buy it but since it is in Amazon people like myself are more likely to try it.

You're not seeing the big picture. If you build a reputable brand people will buy from you, just show them you exist.