Ranking an amazon affiliate website.

Google wants original content. As long as you stick to their guidelines of unique, unspun content you'll be fine. Also stay away from spammy backlinking services.

There has been a lot of hysteria about Penguin but in my opinion I think it's a positive change. There has been too much crap on the Internet for too long.

Yeah I posted two new articles like last week. One of them is rank 32 and it's moving up still (hopefully).

I had an amazon niche site pulling in about 300 dollars a month get killed by penguin. Right now I am on track for about 20 bucks this month.

I am sort of waiting a bit longer for things to settle down and then I will try re-ranking some of these sites.

I still have a portfolio of Amazon review sites that are still performing well. I'm sure the latest Google update killed alot of thin review sites with questionable backlink profiles but it had nothing to do with sites targeting Amazon products.

The sites I'm tracking that had unique content were not affected.

The ones that used the Amazon affiliate scripts and just grabbed / scraped something that was already out there, those tanked.

Getting unique content written for your best ranking keywords doesn't have to be that expensive. I usually pay $2-$4 per 500 words, reasonable quality content.

Knowing which keywords rank well is crucial. Without the right tools this could be overwhelming, because there is just so many combinations.

I had one of my aff sites get hit by google that was doing about $80 a day... they sent me this email after the reconsideration request....

Hello,

Thank you for your request.

We’ve reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines, which can be found here: Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help. These guidelines outline illicit practices which may lead Google to take action on a site in order to keep webspam out of search results. In addition to this email, you may also receive a notification in Webmaster Tools regarding the outcome of your reconsideration request.

Specifically, we detected pages on your site which do not provide substantially unique content or added value. For more information about original content, please read our Help Center article at Little or no original content - Webmaster Tools Help. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. As the article mentions, there is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create substantive value for your users. A good rule of thumb is to give users a reason to visit your site first instead of going directly to the merchant's site. For example, you could create organic product reviews, ratings, and product comparisons.

Please correct or remove all content that is outside our quality guidelines. Once you have made these updates, reply to this email noting the specific changes to your site.

If you’d like more specific advice for your site, consider posting in our Webmaster Help Forum, where a community of webmasters may be able to assist you and point out site issues you may have overlooked. You can post to the forum by visiting the following link: Google Groups.

Sincerely,

The Google Search Quality Team

My biggest fail with this site was having 2000 posts of dup content pulled straight from amazon......

I have pretty much sorted it out now and am expecting to be back soon :-)

In total I had 4 sites slapped out of my 200 sites... only one was an aff site 2 were my testing sites and one was a client who had paid a blackhat seo guy last year to do some work, so I am pulling that out of the bag as well :-)

what you need to do is give the user the reason a reason to visit your site first and not go directly to amazon.... simply optimising a site is not good enough anymore....

Add value to your site :-)

It's better now than ever simply because you'll start to see sites that add more value instead of just serving as a "middle-man" for driving traffic to Amazon. If you create quality sites, you'll easily beat out the lazy competition who aren't willing to create high quality unique content.

Create tons of useful, unique content and watch out for over optimization, both on site and off site, and you should be fine.

Man, I'm still making bank with Amazon. With a handful of sites, I make in one hour per day what others make in an entire week at their "regular jobs". You just have to target the right products, provide decent content, and place your affiliate links smartly and you will make money. Oh, and I don't even do any backlinking.

I even have Amazon autoblogs that are ranking very well and earning.

From what I've seen, you can still rank amazon affiliate sites, even after the Penguin update.

I think the problem is that Google wants websites that have value, and since many amazon affiliate sites are not very high quality, that may be the reason why some of them dropped in the SERP's.

Plus, people often blast amazon sites with bad links so that they can increase their site's rankings quickly. Many sites like this were penalized with the penguin update.

Wolfmmiii,
It is encouraging that you are doing well with Amazon considering what is going on with Google.
Mel

Amazon sites are still as good as they have always been. Focus on long tails and you will rake in the money.

Doesn't really matter which affiliate you use. If you dump useless information with spammy keyword density in your content, there are good chances that you cannot do well. So if you have real good and genuine reviews about the products, you can rank it top in the searches. Make sure you carry out On page and Off page SEO for your website.

I don't do any backlinking and my Amazon sites still rank very well. You just have to target products that are easy to rank for. I know it's easier said than done but it is possible and once you learn how to do it, it's cake.

Penguin is still changing. I had a few of my sites come back in the rankings but for the tag, category and about pages instead of the pages that are supposed to rank.

for example one of my websites has website.c0m/tag/productreview ranked #2 where website.c0m/productreview is not even in the top 100

I do think they will eventually get it all straightened out though.

I think you're doing exactly the right thing. Google has said they have no problem with affiliate sites so long as they add value - which is what you're doing with your lengthy reviews.

Keep at it and let us know how it goes.