Amazon & Google... in bed together?

Could be something to do with the future of "Google Products" formerly known as "froogle"

LBrown said:

30. You will not cloak, hide, spoof, or otherwise obscure the URL of your site containing Special Links (including by use of a redirecting page) such that we cannot reasonably determine the site from which a customer clicks through such Special Link to the Amazon Site..

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That doesn't mean you cannot clock your links.This means that cannot for example put your affiliate links on web2.0 page and cloack them through you domain. Because in this case, they would think a refereed uses comes from the domain, but he could actually come from the web 2.0 site.

Example:
Posting link yourdomain.com/out.php?234 on wordpresdess.com.It redirects to Amazon.

ThopHayt said:

If Google wants to start cracking down on "black hat" then why not start with this? Seems REALLY easy to find.

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Using canonical is not a black hat technique, but is quite useful for sites that direct users to a single product with a variety of URLs. With Amazon's superior internal linking structure, they are able to take advantage of their vast size to direct a significant amount of link juice to product pages directly. And as you can see by the use of canonical, affiliates are taking care of the offpage SEO for them.

One could argue that Amazon has abused the use of canonical because so many variants of a single product page are in existence. However, Amazon is quite large and such an accusation would be difficult to prove as they have legitimate reasons for using canonical.

Just as Google discounts some of the link juice that flows through 301s, I suspect canonical is treated in the same fashion. But even with discounting canonical, it is difficult for an affiliate to outrank Amazon on many products without investing a lot into onpage SEO and offpage SEO. There are many products which affiliates have outranked Amazon on, so it can be done. But doing so typically involves promoting unpopular products with extremely low competition.

Affiliates are not directly sending xrumer, scrapebox, etc. links to Amazon product pages. Affiliates are tier 1 links to Amazon product pages and these affiliates link to their sites using some good and/or bad sources. That builds a tier 2 for Amazon product pages. This is why Amazon will never dump their affiliate program. Amazon essentially has a vast number of affiliates building links that benefits Amazon on a large scale.

As a quick follow-up, some may want to read this story: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-apple-forget-facebook-heres-184209532.html

What Googlers worry about in private is a growing trend among consumers to skip Google altogether, and to just go ahead and search for the product they would like to buy on Amazon.com, or, on mobile in an Amazon app. There's data to prove this trend is real. According to ComScore, Amazon search queries are up 73 percent in the last year.

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assphuck said:

As a quick follow-up, some may want to read this story: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-apple-forget-facebook-heres-184209532.html

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Interesting article !

You can bet that if Google ever smartens up to that reality then they'll suddenly find a lot of shady goings on with Amazon.

assphuck said:

As a quick follow-up, some may want to read this story: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-apple-forget-facebook-heres-184209532.html

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I don't think Jeff Bezos is Larry or Sergy's type. But who am I to judge if they're in bed together...

I think it's because amazon associate program goes well with google's page rank algorithm.

Teeheee said:

I think it's because amazon associate program goes well with google's page rank algorithm.

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Wooow... again building number of posts on old threads...