Honestly, their actions do look like they are trying to force a monopoly on linking and advertising. I really hope I’m wrong, but these steps seem like the first in a direction to kill off a lot of smaller businesses–starting with competing affiliates.

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http://www.searchenginejournal.com/affiliate-links-can-pass-link-juice-help-with-seo/7831/

Search engines finally commented on this subject. Not the 301 redirecting, but the passing of link juice by affiliate links in general. That the links are 301ed makes perfectly sense and something that search engines should actually appreciate, because it reduces duplication. The problem was only the unclear position of search engines regarding affiliates = paid links or not, because the answer to that question is a game changer.

With respect to what Amazon.com is doing– from my point of view it is alright since both the user and the bot “sees” the same destination page and there’s no cloaking in that. Amazon has to do that to consolidate their PageRanks. With a site as big as theirs, if they don’t consolidate their incoming links they’d end up with massive URL duplications.

By the way they don’t only do it for their incoming associate links. Even with internal links they also consolidate various URLs and 301 it to the canonical destination. They do massive tracking and so they also have to do this. So in essence, they are not just doing it for their affy links but in general as a practice.

On the other hand I am concerned that they are “allowed” to do this just because they are Amazon.com. Other big less popular sites might be considered by Google as cloaking links if they do this.

You could argue, that this is the same as if a retailer who has multiple URLs to the same product detail page, that are created due to the different paths the user can take to get to that page…and 301 redirects all to just a single version of the page for the search engines, but not the user, where the URL is part of the site navigation and create usability issues, if the user gets 301 redirected as well.

““you get paid for even placing that affiliate link on your site whether or not someone clicks on it”

well, clearly said, then it’s a paid link.
otherwise – i.e. if you’re on revshare/CPA then it’s not.”

Yeah, but that conflicts what Matt said at the beginning…. “3 depending on the affiliate link”

If it is a link on RevShare or CPA, then it is an affiliate link, if it is not, then it is not an affiliate link.

Based on this sentence that you quoted, should have his answer be “2. No” .. I pointed that out in my article actually. However, his answer was not “NO”, it was “3. It Depends” and the intended clarification talked about stuff that has nothing to do with affiliate marketing. …You see what I mean?

Ben… That’s exactly what I am trying to say.. so why the vague answer from Matt, if it can be a clear one. I suspect that it has to do with the lack of understanding of affiliate marketing on Matt’s side. I try to help him with the understanding to enable him to give better answers to webmasters out there.

Affiliates get paid a commission for a ‘conversion’ – so they only link to pages (or products) that are relevant to their visitors needs (and hence make them money).

If the visitor is getting what they want (after all – they converted)… it must be a relevant link (the kind that Google should be counting).

Amazon is not showing different content to anyone – what’s the issue?

From Google’s perspective, I can’t think of a better signal of quality and relevance (for a link) than somebody actually converting on the destination page (which must be happening, or the affiliate would send the traffic elsewhere).

Doesn’t everyone benefit from this?

That is not philosophical question but I doubt that Google would dare to make such a radical move and penalize Amazon because of that. Probably my site would be detected and banned very fast if I would do similar things. That’s the difference between small guy and ‘brand’

Small guy vs. brand
SPAM = large volume email delivery
exchange links = co-branding
scrapping = content syndication
clocking = conditional content delivery
doorway pages = landing pages
etc.