berto - 10:46 pm on Mar 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

The money loss is not substantial. It is not worth my while to set up my small-potatoes "business" elsewhere in order to save my relatively paltry Amazon revenue.

My Amazon product links are, in part, in the form of sidebar product thumbnails that serve as eye candy. Without them, my site would be much more visually drab. And what would I replace the colorful Amazon product thumbnails with? Even drabber Adsense text ads? (Adsense image ads do not work well at this site.)

Ultimately, I want to keep the links (with associates tag removed) in order to better serve my site visitors, and to promote our common "cause", not really to make money.

My concern is: Might I still run into trouble with this arrangement? Whether with Amazon or the State of Illinois -- even though I am no longer an Amazon affiliate, much less do I directly benefit financially from any remaining ties (via the remaining cleaned-up links) to Amazon.

There must be hundreds of non-affiliate sites within Illinois that casually link to Amazon products. Except for my large number of links, I am now no different from these other incidental, occasional linkers. And presumably we have nothing to fear. Correct?