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

Search for a physical product usually ranks Amazon #1, even though it may not provide the best user experience. What is being done to prevent large corporations from dominating search engine results? Steve K, Pennsylvania

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• Category

  Science & Technology

[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.

[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...

[Ron Nixon]

I used to sell books online. Amazon comes up #1 almost without exception and #2 and #3 for the same search terms. Search for "Dad The Man Who Lied To Save the Planet". Amazon is #1, #2 and #3. #1 says they don't carry the product and refers the customer to affiliates who low ball the price. #2 is a bad link reffering customer to home page. #3 is reviews. I will defend Amazon's right to destroy my business and other businesses, but, at least give us a fighting chance to compete.

[Ethan Pepper]

Affiliate links, 3rd Party Items, Customer Reviews, CTRs, Bounce Rate ETC.

[Ling Zhenqi]

tell us more about the strategy?

[Ethan Pepper]

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?

[Sam Gardam]

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

[biyts]

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