Will Listing Products on Amazon Hurt My Own Rankings?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

I have an ecommerce site (or two).

So, a sales rep from Amazon.com called and said that I should start listing some of my fairly unique products (they don't have UPCs) for sale on their site.

I worry that since amazon has so much authority, that the listings on amazon would outrank the listings for the same product on my own site (in effect, pushing my side down at least one spot in the SERPs).

Since I will have to pay 15% commission to Amazon, I am not sure that is such a good idea.

So, does anyone have any thoughts or experience regarding listing a product that you sell that ranked well, only to see it knocked out by Amazon once you started listing it there?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

My experience - if an established site already promotes the product, the Amazon page only rarely outranks the established site. If you have a cluster of pages for a product, that seems to help outrank the big A's single page.

[edited by: tedster at 12:29 pm (utc) on Sep 9, 2010]

[Robert Charlton]

I suggest that you substantially rewrite the product descriptions you give to Amazon. Being outranked isn't the worse thing in the world, but getting filtered out as a dupe is something you don't want to have happen.

[Planet13]

Thank you, tedster and Robert Charlton:

If you have a cluster of pages for a product, that seems to help outrank the big A's single page.

Could you clarify what you mean by "a cluster of pages for a product"?

If one product is Porcelain Widgets and it is in the category Ceramic Widgets, there might be one or two other products that link internally to that Porcelain Widgets product (though a "YOu Might Also Like" type of link).

But there wouldn't normally be several "additional information" pages about that single Porcelain Widgets product.

So if you could give an example of what you mean by cluster of pages, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

I think you do get the idea - not just a product description page but other pages about the same product that go in-depth on different facets: Porcelain Widget Maintenance, Porcelain Widget Usage Ideas, Who Invented Porcelain Widgets, etc.

Google seems to look at more than "just the page" when it ranks a page - it looks at the destination site altogether with respect to the query term. A site that offers a better resource (has more than one potentially ranking page for the term) and also has a history of offering content related to the query term can definitely outrank the Bezos Behemoth.

[Planet13]

Thanks for the clarification!