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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

> The operative phrase in the original comment was “without mentioning”.

As a reader you wouldn't be weirded out if the first section of the article was to justify why an affiliate link was used?

That would annoy me as a reader a lot more than having an affiliate link used without mention. I mean, I'm not sitting there trying to trick people into clicking links. The blog post is just an honest look / opinion on the keyboard. If you decide to click and buy one, that's cool. If you close the article in 5 seconds after skimming around, that's cool too.

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> As a reader you wouldn't be weirded out if the first section of the article was to justify why an affiliate link was used?

Nope, and as the flagging of this article shows, it's worse without disclosure.

It's not just an ethical requirement, it's a legal one. (I believe Amazon's affiliate program guidelines requires disclosure)

> I believe Amazon's affiliate program guidelines requires disclosure

Good call, I just found it in their agreement in section 5: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...

Technically I do mention it on my site but maybe it's not clear enough since I only wrote about it once or twice in a comment on a different post.

I'm working on something now to make this more apparent on all pages that have an affiliate link (which is less than 10 out of ~300 pages).

This is just routine disclosure and it might be legally required. There's been a lot of noise about it in recent years as a lot of blogs, reviewers and influencers started getting paid to pitch products without disclosure.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/if-influencers-are...

What weirds me out more is seeing the phrase "Amazon Basics keyboard ".

You've established the article is just about the Amazon Basics keyboard; just refer to it as the keyboard for the rest of the story.

Way too clickbaity/SEO method of writing it.

> You've established the article is just about the Amazon Basics keyboard; just refer to it as the keyboard for the rest of the story. > Way too clickbaity/SEO method of writing it.

I did that because I talk about other keyboards through out the article and when people skim it gets hard to track what "their" or "the" really means (especially if they are clicking links).

If you do a search for "the keyboard" you'll see I use that phrase 9 times and "their keyboard" twice. When combined together that's more often than I use "Amazon Basics keyboard", so I'm not just spamming phrases for SEO. If anything doing that will de-value your page rank for keyword stuffing.

I mentioned the keyboard by name the least amount of times to keep the article skimmable and making it clear that when you click a link, it's leading to that keyboard. In other words, it's a UI feature not a bug!

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