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Comment by xgbi | Hacker News Reader

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…

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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.

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.

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