Something that I have noticed since using Amazon's Web Services is that quite often Google will index Amazon links with my associate ID in them, and rank them highly. It seems that when Google's crawling my site, somehow it takes one or two affiliate URLs and places them in the SERPs, usually as the top result, because they are actually pages on the Amazon domain, which obviously is a big authority domain.

Although Google crawls my site which has hundreds, or even thousands of AWS-generated links, only one or two will show up at any one time in the SERPs. I'm not entirely sure why it's happening, but it seems to last a day or two before disappearing, and then another one will spring up in its place. It's almost as if Google adds it to the SERPs, takes a day or two to realise it made a mistake and replace it with the plain Amazon link, but then makes the same mistake again and adds a new one to the SERPs.

I've never seen this happen with any of my plain text Associate links that I've created in the Associate control panel, only with links generated from the Web Services API. If you use the API and want to see if any of your links have been indexed and ranked (though a spike in sales for a specific product is usually a giveaway), you can use the allinurl operator on Google.

e.g. search for allinurl:associateid-20

(replace associateid and 20 with the right values for you!)

Put that down as another great reason to use Amazon's Web Services.

Labels: amazon, aws, web services