Optimizing an Amazon Store for Google

[billnad]

< This post was split from: How To Optimize For Large Retail Sites [webmasterworld.com] >

I look through this thread thinking about my Amazon stores and realize that no matter what I try to do there are far to many of the amazon stores around that I could make a big difference. There are a few parts of the page that are specific to each product / page

Title of page
H1 tag
Name
Picture
description
reviews

The trouble is that everyone with an Amazon datafeed site uses the same info. I can not distinguish myself compared to any other site.

I believe that many people are just like me in thinking that with a site that has 1000's of products that there must be just a few magic tweaks that could push the pages to the top of Google and get thousands of sales as well.

Well I have to admit I have not found those magic tweaks and thus have just left those sites up and have moved on to more content generated sites with the content generated by me.

Anyone else in the same boat with Amazon sites?

[edited by: tedster at 9:12 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2006]

[tedster]

It's been awhile since I worked with an Amazon store, but I agree with you that are probably no simple tweaks that will make one site using the Amazon feed outperform other sites doing the same. This is more true now than ever with Google working to exclude what they call "thin affiliate" sites for the earch results.

My one remaining client who is, nominally, an Amazon affiliate, began developing their own content to attract more visitors. That side project ended up becoming their core business.

Still, I know from working with other feeds that sometimes there can be ways of squeezing something extra out of the feed data - something that adds significant value for visitors and attracting links and traffic. I'd love to hear more input here. No one would give away the entire recipe for their ow "secret sauce", I know, but a success story or two with just a hint would be enjoyable and inspiring.

[peterdaly]

I was one of the first people to get into that market a few years ago. As one of the first to the party, I ranked above the Amazon page for many items. It was nice while it lasted. I had about 13k visits a day at one point. It was big enough for my site to be listed as one of a 5 example "sucessful" sites in an internal Amazon presentation (thank you google :-)

I closed up shop on that market about a year ago once things slowed to near zero. I now consider the market dead. Too many people are doing to little unique things with the same content. The search engines are too good at filtering these sites out of the results.

The opportunity has passed.

I think unique content is now a requirement, and most Amazon feed content will only hurt you.

[MrSpeed]

I started an amazon store about two years ago.
Even at that point I was late to the game. I tried to add an RSS feed to the pages to add more content to distinguish myself from the rest. The problem is that those RSS feeds are duplicate content by nature.

Here's the strange part. Around Sept/Oct I started to get pretty large volume of sales for Amazon. In the past month I've had close to 250 orders.

I have no idea if my amazon store is sending this traffic. In my opinion it can't be since traffic has been unchanged to my site and is a trickle at 20-30 visitors/day. On the other hand I don't see any trends that the sales are coming from any of my other sites that have amazon banners or links.

I always use the same tracking codes for sites because Amazon didn't offer tracking codes at the time.

I am tempted to add a unique tracking code to my Amazon store but I don't want to screw up what is my best quarter ever with Amazon.

Ok so back to the topic at hand. What to do with Amazon or affiliate feed sites.

I think the best answer is to pick a topic, write unique content for it and become the very best source of information for that subject. Do not use any data or RSS feeds to add "unique content". There's a lot of discussion about "shingles" and duplicate content. Keep cranking out sites/content until you can see what sticks. You may want to create all sites going forward on a blogging platform so users can add comments/reviews and that may help as well.

The fact of the matter is that it is getting easier and easier for people to publish on the web. Datafeeds were awesome a few years ago because no one wanted to write about percale sheets, chef knives, construction tools and other mundane subjects.

The threshold for what people will create sites for has been lowered. The same has happened for geographical topics as well.

Another approach to set yourself apart would involve blackhat techniques like cloaking Markov Chain generated content. It may or may not work. If it does it would be short lived.

The datafeed era was fun. Just like the doorway page era of 97-99.

[londrum]

i had an interesting thing happen when i shut my amazon shop down.
the shop closed because the actual website that i housed it on was closed as well.. but amazon continued to credit me with sales for months afterwards.

i am guessing that a few people out there in webland must have copied the links to a particular product onto their site, or their blog, or whatever - with my amazon ID still in it - and their visitors continued to follow them... which credited me with the sale.

made me think of an idea... write some RSS feeds about green widgets, or whatever, and link to a book on green widgets at the bottom. then when people pick up the feed they will be spreading your amazon ID far and wide.

[WiseWebDude]

What amazes me is the fact that people are actually using Amazon. I mean you are feeding a monster only to be eaten by them some day. I despise Amazon and discount their SERPS totally and NEVER click on them as I am so sick of them. They have people so fooled that simply think they are going to get rich by making a store in Amazon only to end up feeding them. You are NOT helping yourself, you are helping THEM and they love to see you do it. Sorry, I simply HAVE to speak my mind on this one.

Make your OWN site, be decent, be better, be cool, but do NOT feed the beast. They ONLY care that you feed THEIR growth, not yours.

:)

[dibbern2]

My experience was similiar to MrSpeed's.

I had developed a strong selection of books around one topic - sportsfishing. I didn't use the Amazon store feeds, but instead hand built each page for each book. I covered A LOT of subtopics. At its best, about 2 years ago, I was selling a hundred books a day.

Then the *Thin Affiliate Police* found me, and I hadn't a chance, what with only one outbound link on each page, and that always to Amazon. I dissappeared from the serps, came back, and then dissappeared again.

That section has been just sitting there, probably dragging down the rest of my site, selling a few dozen titles every month.

And suddenly, yesterday, someone ordered a 50 inch HDTV from my poor little fishing pages. Go figure.

[billnad]

I too have mostly given up on these datafeed Amazon sites. I do not have many if any inbound links because I know how saturated the Amazon feed market is but I brought up this thread only because i seems like such an untapped resource having thousands of "pages" on your domain that you can change all of with just a little editing of the template.

I have 6 or 7 Amazon stores but I get most of my Amazon sales from a blog post that I did to review an herbal supplement that I did a year and a half ago and that post and a related one make me at least half of all my measly Amazon income.