Why do Amazon.com pages tend to rank well for product queries?

[elancep]

Google doesn't care which shopping venue shows up as #1. The truth is amazon.com has put into a place a strategy that allows their products to rank higher than their competitors. They are one of the biggest sites on the web with tons of links (affiliate and non affiliate).

[6sLaurine383]

nice...

[GearFromFotoSharp]

I sell a product that has over 70 positive customer reviews on an independent website, but it's trumped in Google rankings by a competitor product on Amazon that has a dozen reviews, 2 of which are bad. Up until recently, my site came was among the top 2 or 3 sites for numerous key words, but not now. Explain.

[gatordog99]

So what you're saying is that Google search is now deprecated. We can find products on Amazon, information on Wikipedia. Google's main concentration seems to be on trying to re-invent the rest of the web. With your clones of Paypal (Google Checkout) and Facebook (Google Plus) tanking, does Google have any real vision of the future?

[samiam32835]

Thanks Matt, love you, but that was a very weak answer. Why should I or other shoppers search for products on google if we get Amazon all the time? May as well just go to Amazon.com and search for those products.

I agree with FearlessHyena82: "People are skipping the Google and going directly to Amazon. Amazon is making Google irrelevant to shopping users, and Google is helping them do it."

May be people will only use google to spy on others and find out celebrities birthdays.

[TGcommercial]

Amazon gets a lot of links to their product pages and their product descriptions and reviews are actually great :) It's not low-quality content at all

[thisiswilson2]

@TGcommercial Yeah, I'd rather Amazon come up for all product search, and wikipedia for all info search, that's it.

Google should just index those two sites.

[biyts]

Also doesn't explain why Amazon dominates the rankings on Google Shopping Results, even when others have well structured feeds. Just a thought...

[thisiswilson2]

@biyts PR

[davidwarna]

the right question would be "how much amazon pays google?"

[mjdayetube]

This is an important question. I have no issue believing Amazon is a default result for books. However, I do think if every book had a richly optimized landing page targeting only that book and relevant keyword(phrases) for that book, it would appear number 1 more often that not. The problem is, not every book has a customized landing page.

[FearlessHyena82]

Interesting to know!

[shuntermen]

Thanks for responding to this important issue. However, it only fuels the conspiracy fire. Is it Amazon's ad spend that pushes them to the top? Affiliate links? Have they cracked the Google code? Is Amazon the default "official page" if another is not found for a product? Without a doubt, they dominate product results in organic & shopping.

People are skipping the Google and going directly to Amazon. Amazon is making Google irrelevant to shopping users, and Google is helping them do it.

[MrTVTL]

The question was poorly worded. What the poster meant to say was "why does Amazon.com rank above my site for every product on it?"

[tikoim]

Amazon has a good site, okay - but millions of 'partners' adding deep links for free is the other side of the medal. There should be a nofollow from Amazon partnernet by default because too many webmaster just copy-paste the amazon affiliate link - so the hegemon is growing. I do like Amazon but in a way Google suggests to add nofollow to 'paid' links to keep index 'true' - but with Amazons' concept there is in my view a index distortion just because people adding backlinks... money wins

[SDorje]

Ad dollars...That's the answer....

[leoncariz]

As usual, he beats the horse not to answer the question.

Amazon is becoming an EMPIRE, Matt, they are killing BestBuy and any other local companies with NO TAX - FREE SHIPPING. If this is the world you want to create, yeah go for it. Otherwise, allow other competitors to survive.

I was contacted by Amazon sales people several times to get my ecommerce website products listed on their website. They are trying to acquire every small e-commerce company and include them on their website.

[geofpday]

Matt - we love you - but please answer the question.

I have a product that has ranked # 1 for years that manufactures a real product. Amazon has suddenly outranked us on a specific keyword that directly describes our product - and what does Amazon give us? 4 or 5 pages of cheap products that act like what we do but would never be purchased by a professional working in the industry. does this worry us-NO-does it look bad for Google and Amazon - YES. this appears to be blatant boosting.

[keylargofoley]

Thanks for the thoughts here Matt. As always, I enjoy hearing your approach. My concern with these queries is not that Amazon usually ranks first (unless like you say there is a well structured home page for the book or the author). My concern is more that Amazon gets the first, second, third, and often fourth position. It doesn't feel that this is a good experience for your users and it doesn't serve the purpose of a general search engine. Just my thoughts.

John Foley - President, BN.com

[djhidding]

Hey Matt - not sure I totally agree with the answer. Discounting books, the premise of the question is still correct - Amazon almost always seems to rank at or near the top for products in general. As a test, I just searched for four unrelated items sitting on my desk (17" MacBook Pro, Parker Sonnet rollerball, Panasonic HC700 headphones, Palmer's lotion) and Amazon was in either the first or second slot for all four. I think Rickett'sFish asks the right question...

[jandhtackle]

Hey Matt, I think you missed the essence of this question. I don't think Steve K wanted to know about homepages for physical products but why Amazon ranks higher than other stores for most products. The answer is their affiliate program and all the incoming links coming from that. I wonder how they would rank without it.

[rlbucich]

@jandhtackle strongly disagree - affiliate program drives traffic that engages with the page/buys product.  Those links do not juice the site. There are a ton of quality signals coming from that site and it's no fault of Google that it ranks well.

[jandhtackle]

@rlbucich The pages we are talking about are product pages, to which thousands and thousands of affiliate links are linking in. You don't think this is a major factor in why amazon ranks well for their non book products?

[rlbucich]

@jandhtackle Here's the Amazon robots.txt file: amazon com/robots.txt looks to me all affiliate links are blocked (as they should) - happy engaged traffic is the name of the game

[RickettsFish]

Are there characteristics of Amazon product pages that perform better in Google's search algorithm? Are Amazon competitors not providing information about products that Google is seeking in order to rank better?