Busting Amazon Associates Duplicate Content Myth

[PuReWebDev]

I've read about myths regularly online from various forums and blogs that having Amazon pages on your site would not benefit you, or that the duplicate content in Google would not be picked up. I've heard all types of things such as you'll get banned or have pages dropped from the index, to you won't earn a penny. Here's one of those myths quoted:

Affiliate content equals duplicate content maybe..
I was reading what SEO Dave was saying about his Amazon affiliate stuff being PR zeroed these days and him putting it down to Google being better at spotting and demoting affiliate content. It could well be that because the same text ...

I'm posting today to say that those myths are not correct. I've spent the last two months optimizing my new Amazon Web Services site LiveWebShop.com to be very search engine friendly. Two months later, I have 102,000+ pages www.livewebshop.com]indexed in Google[/url] (at the time of this writing). Google has been happy to grant me a page rank of 3 in just under 45 days. While the page rank is still small, it's not a zero. In fact I'm sure it will go up in the next month or two again.

I'd like to let every developer who has been considering Amazon Web Services, or who currently has been using it and hasn't been getting the type of traffic they deserve know, that "You Can Do It". If you are going to use a script to get you started faster, make sure that you try to make your web urls search engine friendly, this means absolutely no session id's in the url, commonly refered to as the search engine kiss of death. Also, consider using different page titles, descriptions and keywords for your product pages, or none at all. It's bad having the same meta tags on all of your pages (Google can see that as duplicate content).

Consider urls that are static, so meaning it doesn't have a question mark or query string in the url. While the search engines will index the page, you don't want the search engine to believe that the query will produce a limitless amount of pages and stop indexing. Display related products as much as possible. This will help enhance your user's shopping experience, and for search engine purposes, the related content adds more weight and value to your product pages.

What Google doesn't like and penalizes for, are sites that use an affiliate script and don't make any modifications, just an out-of-the-box script. You've got to make an effort to produce something original. Even if it's just modifying the arrangement of the text, the reviews, the image sizes, or the sort orders. Add things like breadcrumb trails and sitemaps to your site.

All of those changes that you make are unique to you and your site. They produce a different effect then your off the shelf script. Those changes will help alot in getting your site's pages viewed as unique. Remember, Amazon lets you use the api not just to display the product information, but to do it in a new and innovative way, this should be your approach. Most search engines are offering their users the ability to create sitemaps to inform the search engine about their new pages. Take advantage of this. If you can help the search engine along, then you shorten the time it would have taken to index your pages otherwise.

Your Amazon Web Services site can also benefit from you taking it from the run of the mill display the product and buy button pages....to a full blown e-commerce shopping experience, complete with shopping carts and the bells and whistles that shoppers care about. LiveWebShop.com has taken this approach. Simulate an order on the site, and you will have an entirely new shopping experience. It's even be taken so far as to have the checkout taking place on the site, and not the Amazon site, which is another twist on the norm.

These recommendations are sure to drive more visitors, and hopefully those visitors will enjoy your site enough to become shopping cart checkouts.

Amazon duplicate cotent myth: Busted

[Mr. Byagi]

I can see how your site would do well. You're not just going directly to Amazon. You go to Amazon later on, after you've offered information and products through your own site. Good stuff.