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Comment by petee | Hacker News Reader

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies... https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/G8TW5AE...

Quite a few spots mention "original" and "creative content" - because you have essentially just a database I'm betting they do not see it as original 'creative' content. It seems the goal of their program is to have bloggers write about the products being sold. Rather than simply decode the tire, they want you to upsell.

Maybe if you were to include individual/separate pages or 'blog' posts about each facet of the tires' specs, as painful as that is.

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I've shared this before, but this has happened to me - 3 times - with different sites I created. One was very similar in nature to OP's (essentially a specialized tool/calculator with affiliate links to the products), and another was a very detailed guide for making a DIY electronics product. It was "creative" enough to be featured on the front page of hackaday.com, but I guess not enough for Amazon's affiliate program.

Traffic also wasn't a problem - in one case they pulled my program membership only after I had generated hundreds of dollars in referred sales (of course they didn't pay the commission). Needless to say, it has left a bad taste in my mouth ever since. In my opinion, if they have such a narrow interpretation of what "original" or "creative" means (applying only to blog-style content, or who knows what), then I frankly don't care to do anything more with their affiliate program or drive sales to them.

Wow, thanks a lot for sharing your experience.

This is what you get when a company is the regulator of a market. I guess government regulation isn't so bad after all.

Or just don’t affiliate with amazon. Instead use an online service, that is dedicated to your niché and both profit.

Seems like government regulation against corporate control of markets is still a good idea.

Or you could view it as the government is just the biggest corporation.

One that in theory at least you get to vote for representation on the board.

Doesn't work very well though when a lot of people vote to kneecap it and let all the corporations you don't have any say over run the show.

That's not really a fair comparison. Most western governments have an Ombudsman where citizens can complain if they are treated unfairly. A government acting against its citizens the way Amazon does against its users would be unlikely and unlawful, whereas Amazon can get away with it because they are not breaking any laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman

I don’t know last time I complained about the dmv to the government, it felt about as useless as complaining to HR. Probably less so.

You probably have more agency to change a corporation, if it isn’t a mega corporation. Mega corporations, good luck, unless you have lots of money or influence.

Ok government is definitely just a mega corp. the other lesser mega corps have some influence, but not us peons.

In the US, maybe we citizens would have a slight chance at having influence if we eliminated the 17th amendment.

Either one is no good if you allow them to grow too large to "see product level" to properly serve the "consumer".

Yeah, this happened to one of our sites, and we resolved it by making a blog we post to every couple of months. We get basically zero sales through the actual blog posts.

Thanks for sharing your experience. So it really looks like Amazon expects a blog-like page.

Do you host both websites (or website and whatever "web" the other thing is) on the same domain, or those are completely different entities, so you can just point amazon to the blog?

Same domain - we just have a /blog path. So the main site is www.example.com, and the blog is at www.example.com/blog

It looks like you've already put in a lot of work to parse out individual specs and data for the tires. I bet you could inject a paragraph or 2 of text using that, and place that on the pages somewhere. Just make a few different templates with some random phrasing to generate variations, like:

- This off-road tire features a track width of xxx mm, making it perfect for...

- Designed for off-road use, this tire is xxx mm wide, and features...

- Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, produces this xyz model of tube for...

...

Cool idea, thanks! I will give it a try.

There's also templates that can do "spintax", so you get more variations, like:

{The|This} tire {is $width mm wide|{features|has} a {track |}width of $width mm}}

Thank you, I have not heard of Spintax before. Nevertheless, I will try to provide added value for readers in the texts.

Am I the only one shocked that this is required ? This is essentially advocating for SERP spam, which is the bane of my existence.

Websites with generic sentences like this make everyone lose their time when they are looking for tangible information.

If Amazon asks for that kind of shitty content to justify the existence of a valuable site like yours, I’d skip them entirely and search elsewhere to monetize…

I think you can take this to a point where it's SERP spam, but what I was suggesting doesn't fall into that category, at least to me. A paragraph or two of descriptive text with actual info supplied by a specs table seems reasonable to me. Some people may even absorb info better when done that way.

My suggestion (as a reply) for spintax is a little closer to spam, especially if you get carried away. Done right, though, it's not very different from what a copy writer would do manually. Products have product descriptions, and they are somewhat formulaic even when a person writes them.

If you poke around the site, you can see that time was spent parsing out various specs that aren't understood by other similar sites as anything other than strings of text. The tweaking would mostly be to get Amazon to accept it.

From what they describe it’s not “required” by Amazon — sounds like they don’t want that sort of automated/database-oriented content at all.

What you are reacting to is a way to trick Amazons bots and the underpaid bored agents looking over affiliate sites.

Now, you know why recipes all have that bullshit "story" above the actual recipe.

Affiliate programs act like "human interest stories" are the only way to make people intrigued or some such horse shit some MBA probably came up with and we all now have to suffer.

As you say, the sites are the way they are because that is what search engines and affiliate programs reward.

Generate filler content with GPT-3.

I'm surprised to see them take such a narrow view of what kind of sites are suitable. It seems to me that the OP is providing a useful tool, why wouldn't Amazon want to reward him for driving (probably highly motivated to buy) traffic to their site.

Good point, more written text could perhaps help.

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