Discovered a network of Amazon affiliate sites

Glen did it here: https://detailed.com/google-control/. He revealed 16 companies dominating Google each with their own network of sites.

So, take this as my own version of that blog post. Before I reveal the network of sites, I'd like to make three things clear:

1. These sites are owned by a company, not an individual, so there's nothing wrong in outing them. I'm pretty sure the owners aren't members of BHW too.
2. I don't know the name of the company running the sites, but it's impossible for one person to own and manage all these high traffic sites (correct me if I'm wrong).
3. If you don't like threads like this where sites are outed, just don't comment. Period. It's not against the rules, and I'll keep outing sites like these unless a mod tells me to stop. So save your breath if you're going to spew thrash like some idiots did here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/this-2-year-old-affiliate-site-is-making-so-much-money-through-amazon.1161297/. Nothing you say will stop me, so if you don't like it, save your comment and leave this thread.
4. This thread is for informational purposes alone. I'd advise those who are interested in starting their own Amazon affiliate sites or improving theirs to take some cues from these sites, as they are clearly successful. That's the main purpose of this thread, just like the other one I started.

So, here is the network of sites:

Bestofmachinery.com (already revealed)
Hotrate.com
Musiccritic.com
Myproscooter.com
Shoeadviser.com
Top9rated.com (penalised)
Productexpert.com (penalised, then redirected to top9rated, but redirect has been removed and site content deleted as well).

As you will notice, all these sites follow the same format:

- Search bar on homepage (with a few exceptions)
- List of articles under different categories on homepage
- Only 3 products in comparison table
- Horizontal comparison tables that all look similar

I also discovered a quora account that was used to promote all of these sites. The account had nothing but answers that have links to all the sites above.

That's all. Hope you find a good use for this information.

I will have a look at this in the evening. If it does contain the info that I am expecting as per the title, it would definitely be a great source.

Not surprising to be hones but interesting nonetheless.

I like the "Worried about ranking top three? Why not just take all of the spots" - Something I follow myself. Why have one site when you can have 3?

Bookmarked it

Stackz said:

Not surprising to be hones but interesting nonetheless.

I like the "Worried about ranking top three? Why not just take all of the spots" - Something I follow myself. Why have one site when you can have 3?

Click to expand...

That's right. Pretty tiresome to deal with content placement & links though.

And by the way they are breaking Amazon affiliate TOS, they don't have disclosure in every page, and recently you must have your disclosure even closer to your affiliate links

Also (from what i can see through the frontend) they are just running simple on-page SEO nothing in particular

Amazon doesn't explicitly say that we should have affiliate disclosure in every page. But people want to be safe. So most of them are doing it.
Also disclosure close to affiliate links is an FTC guide and not really by Amazon. That email we received from Amazon was mainly aimed at people promoting Amazon on social media.

They have good on page SEO. Right.
Bestifmacginery also got lot of links.

neo said:

Amazon doesn't explicitly say that we should have affiliate disclosure in every page. But people want to be safe. So most of them are doing it.
Also disclosure close to affiliate links is an FTC guide and not really by Amazon. That email we received from Amazon was mainly aimed at people promoting Amazon on social media.

They have good on page SEO. Right.
Bestifmacginery also got lot of links.

Click to expand...

Their link profile is filled with niche edits.

HustleTong said:

That's right. Pretty tiresome to deal with content placement & links though.

Click to expand...

What do you mean?

Ok But thats fine. If you need to see the godfather, search hearst media.

Stackz said:

What do you mean?

Click to expand...

Dealing with mutiple sites, nothing else.

HustleTong said:

Dealing with mutiple sites, nothing else.

Click to expand...

The part I was confused about was the "content placement", not sure what that means exactly. But yes, I agree - It's definitely more work if you have 2-3 sites rather than one. It can be worth it though depending on the niche and ROI potential.

A good tip would be to create one first to see the potential first (if proper keyword research isn't telling you enough for some reason) and then build more sites if it's a good niche.

Most of the link profiles are crap, some of the paid links are preposterous. Link from musical magazine and article with title "vacuum pumps and compressors". What the actual fuck Google.

AngelSeo said:

Most of the link profiles are crap, some of the paid links are preposterous. Link from musical magazine and article with title "vacuum pumps and compressors". What the actual fuck Google.

Click to expand...

Yeah, Google's far from perfect. You realize they still have a long way to go when you see sites like these ranking and banking.

Music critic is one I'm following, and was discussed pretty thoroughly in this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/h...x-figures-per-year-behind-the-scenes.1115022/

This person (or persons) put their eggs in different baskets, and they're making bank staying 2 or 3 steps ahead of Google. It's a churn and burn play, since with 100% certainty they have never touched any of the products they review.

The content on these sites is ATROCIOUS, fam. This is a copy/paste from one of their sites (a page that's ranking #1 for the keyword):


It's incredible that with BERT supposedly in play now, that still passes a quality check. It's crazy listening to Google mouthpieces like John Mu & Danny Sullivan repeatedly talk about how these tactics don't work...

leiferikson said:

It's incredible that with BERT supposedly in play now, that still passes a quality check. It's crazy listening to Google mouthpieces like John Mu & Danny Sullivan repeatedly talk about how these tactics don't work...

Click to expand...

BERT has nothing to do with quality or ranking.

bahus said:

BERT has nothing to do with quality or ranking.

Click to expand...

It's about matching query intent better, huh?

This is an excellent info post. I find it very interesting. Thanks for your sharing.

What do you think are the reasons for a penalty on some of the sites? How did you figure out that they are penalized?

Thanks for your insight.

assaultclass said:

Glen did it here: https://detailed.com/google-control/. He revealed 16 companies dominating Google each with their own network of sites.

So, take this as my own version of that blog post. Before I reveal the network of sites, I'd like to make three things clear:

1. These sites are owned by a company, not an individual, so there's nothing wrong in outing them. I'm pretty sure the owners aren't members of BHW too.
2. I don't know the name of the company running the sites, but it's impossible for one person to own and manage all these high traffic sites (correct me if I'm wrong).
3. If you don't like threads like this where sites are outed, just don't comment. Period. It's not against the rules, and I'll keep outing sites like these unless a mod tells me to stop. So save your breath if you're going to spew thrash like some idiots did here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/t...-making-so-much-money-through-amazon.1161297/. Nothing you say will stop me, so if you don't like it, save your comment and leave this thread.
4. This thread is for informational purposes alone. I'd advise those who are interested in starting their own Amazon affiliate sites or improving theirs to take some cues from these sites, as they are clearly successful. That's the main purpose of this thread, just like the other one I started.

So, here is the network of sites:

Bestofmachinery.com (already revealed)
Hotrate.com
Musiccritic.com
Myproscooter.com
Shoeadviser.com
Top9rated.com (penalised)
Productexpert.com (penalised, then redirected to top9rated, but redirect has been removed and site content deleted as well).

As you will notice, all these sites follow the same format:

- Search bar on homepage (with a few exceptions)
- List of articles under different categories on homepage
- Only 3 products in comparison table
- Horizontal comparison tables that all look similar

I also discovered a quora account that was used to promote all of these sites. The account had nothing but answers that have links to all the sites above.

That's all. Hope you find a good use for this information.

Click to expand...

youtube1001 said:

This is an excellent info post. I find it very interesting. Thanks for your sharing.

What do you think are the reasons for a penalty on some of the sites? How did you figure out that they are penalized?

Thanks for your insight.

Click to expand...

They are obviously doing exactly what Google calls "participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76465.
They also have lots of hacked niche edits. Such sites usually get penalised eventually. To know if a site has been penalised, go over to Semrush.com or ahrefs.com and do a search for the site's domain name. If you see a sharp drop in traffic in its organic traffic graph, it most likely has been penalised.

How did you out them ? By their affiliate tag ?
'I've also considered to create different sites but it means several Amazon associates accounts ,which requires different identities ...Not easy to do .
How do they manage several identities and accounts without being caught