Amazon Affiliate Sites - Able to Avoid Google Slap?

[bansal]

Originally Posted by Inari

our opinion is - that's pretty much unavoidable in the long run if you run a small-scale affiliate site. you may survive Panda or Kangaroo or whatever update will come next, but in the long run you're fighting an uphill and losing battle. that's why we have approached the traffic/SEO question completely differently for the past 2 years - first building a useful service/directory style site with 1,000,000+ unique pages, and THEN monetizing it in some way. this has been infinitely easier than making a 50 page hand-written affiliate site and then tediously trying to get traffic to it against thousands of competing sites exactly like yours as well as Google's search quality team.

My site is one page, about 65% of the visitors click through to Amazon, and about 5% of the people who click through buy the product and related products (and sometimes unrelated products if you're lucky). I had that brief scare when my site disappeared, but it has basically turned into a little gold mine. You'd be much better off building 100 sites like mine rather than putting all your eggs into one basket building a large site like that, and convincing yourself it has value just because you dumped a lot of content on it, that may be unique hand written whatever but realistically not that great.