Iguana - 10:38 am on Sep 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

Secondly, your theory of an Amazon page ranking higher 'because' of the affiliates links is pure bs.

Are you sure who is spreading the bs? Perhaps a dose of IMHO is in order.

I did a search for a metallica album . Top result is a url 'www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00000000?v=glance' (Amazon browse page)

I checked backlinks and I found affiliate links with the url of 'http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000000/affid'

I don't think this was true a few months ago, though. Maybe Google engineers helped Amazon to redirect in a more Google friendly way.