Amazon Disses Paid Search Affiliates

Amazon to forbid affiliates linking from paid search ads.

In an email to Amazon Associates today, the firm disclosed it will no longer allow affiliates to send traffic directly to its site from pay-per-click ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Affiliates may still bid on search engines to send traffic to their own web sites, which in turn link to Amazon.com through its affiliate program.

I used to be active at affiliate arbitrage. In a nutshell, that means buying traffic on Google or Yahoo and sending it to an affiliate site to reap the cost-per-action revenue. Thankfully, I got out of that business a long time ago. But some people still make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing it. Some of those people do it strictly with Amazon.com, using sophisticated algorithms to automatically change bid prices based on earnings and Amazon’s inventory. On May 1, when this fresh rule goes into effect, their business will be wiped out. (The rules apply only to North America; other regions’ programs are subject to different rules).

I saw the writing on the wall when affiliate programs started forbidding direct search linking and restricted keyword use. In many ways it’s like the domain parking industry; we rely on Google and Yahoo and one simple change in their policies can wipe us out.