Amazon Making Change That Will Affect Review Sites
Interestingly, Amazon announced in an email overnight that they are changing the way the product API works, and it will no longer return a list of customer reviews. Instead, there will be a simple link over to the actual reviews by the Amazon customers, on the Amazon site.
This means some change in the way reviews are used on your site as well… and with the new format, it seems the only way to show the actual reviews on your site is going to be in an iframe.
This does several things…
- Keeps Amazons OWN content attributed to THEM aka no dup content across thousands of OTHER sites
- Reduces Search Engine Spam sites (lets face it, its true)
- Reduces their own server loads
- Holds them True to their Customers Privacy
- Makes sure Google does not index Amazons content and attribute it to OUR sites! (Same, but different)
The Amazon Reviews API Announcement
On November 8, 2010 the Reviews response group of the Product Advertising API will no longer return customer reviews content and instead will return a link to customer reviews content hosted on Amazon.com. You will be able to display customer reviews on your site using that link. Please refer to the Product Advertising API Developer guide found here for more details. The Reviews response group will continue to function as before until November 8 and the new link to customer reviews is available to you now through the Product Advertising API as well.
If you are a review site builder who relies on the reviews to power your site… you should probably start looking for a new way to get your content! They are NOT going to stop us from showing their reviews, they are however going to remove the search benefit (aka reviews content) that comes from it.
From the Amazon developer forum:
The reviews response group returns the URL to an iframe that contains customer reviews. You can embed the iframe on any web page to display the response content. Each iframe URL is valid for 24 hours. If the iframe URL expires, you will receive a 403 Forbidden error code.
This is a VERY significant change… take it seriously!
Products Likely Affected by the Change
I am thinking out loud right now… and have NOT contacted any of these developers at this point to see if the product will be affected in any way. I suggest you look through the list and if you are using any of the products, get in touch with the support channels to see if you are going to be affected. The changes do not take place until November 8th, so you have 2 full months to prepare or change! I would not wait…
- ReviewAzon
- Amazon AutoPoster
- Amazon Product in a Post
- Amazon Machine Tags
- phpZon
- Amazon AStores
- Store Stacker
- Keywords 2 Websites
- CompariPress
- Niche Site Platform
- Last Amazon Review
- WP Zon Builder
Many…. many… others.
In fact, If you use Amazon even for just products, you would want to double-check with the developers. Even something as small as “17 Reviews for this product” within your product display may be affected. Also, if you have other plugins or applications that make use of the Amazon API, please list it in the comments section. I will update this list to make sure we keep a current list going.
Why The Sudden Change?
Up until now, Amazon has been very forthright with the reviews being sent out in the API. With so much focus on eliminating spam from the web, do you think they may have been asked to take control of this, or was it a voluntary move to save resources?
What do you think?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Amazon API Changes Effective Today, Check your Sites!
- Change at ePN Leaves Your Sites Useless – Again!
- 6 Best Practices with Product Review Sites
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
This basically amazons content, and they don’t like it shared away by software and diluting it on affiliate websites. Lets be honest, every time you take a customer through your niche site to amazon, they lose 4-x% of the commission to you, and if you are using their content to sell stuff and out rank them.. then why would they continue to allow this, especially after they see ebay giving up their traffic.
Yep, I’ve been sitting scratching my head this afternoon deciding on the best way to handle it. After reading through the docs they will still provide content in the form of an IFrame URL BUT you’ll have little control over it’s content other than the item to grab it from. It will basically be displayed as it is on the Amazon server as far as I can see.
I haven’t made a full decision yet but I suspect NSP may have to loose the Amazon reviews feature altogether.
Nightmare!!
@Bruce – 99% Agree Bruce. Although the same could be said for the product info coming through as well.
The reviews are EASILY manipulated and can show 1 or 100, which DOES for sure dilute their own effectiveness, but at the same time… I’m sure they don’t mind the traffic they get from affiliates, which for some busy sites, can be quite a lot. (Those busy & successful sites also don’t tend to be built with amazon reviews)
It sounds to me very similar to the eBay debacle a few years ago, where they simply want to focus on QUALITY affiliates, driving unique visitors with their own content, versus using Azon content to regurgitate a visitor!
@Ben Johnson – I feel your pain for sure Ben.
Mark
I guess it is much better to rewrite the reviews yourself as content – but never mind…
@Tao – LOL or parse them through a spinner :-)
Probably, Google is behind all this. They want all the thin sites killed by all means.
Going to have to get more creative about getting reviews into your sites now… this was bound to happen sooner or later I suppose. All those affected thin affiliate scripts/wordpress plugins. wow…
Mark:
When I use Amazon on my Squidoo Lens I sometime put a review or a portion of a review in the lens under the product. Is this going to be a problem?
I’m assuming that it’s only with the automatic loads from systems like the ReviewAzon.
Right?
Did get that email from Amazon as well. I use ReviewAzon and phpzone on a few of my blogs-losing the reviews will be hard. One thing I am not sure about is I have Amazon astore on some blogs and wondered how that will be affected like this blog http://k9doggy.com/my-doggy-store/ will all reviews just vanishes, need a bit more advice from the gurus-Thank you great post as normal Mark
@Warren – Pretty sure its just the automated stuff that will be stopped Warren.
@ Jason – There are a BUNCH of them for sure! I inventoried my own sites last night and fortunately not many will be affected since I rarely use the review portion of the Amazon fed content… but there are some for sure!
@ Richie – That thought entered my mind as well. Googles suggestions had a role in eBay changing their affiliate program around, so it may be in play here also.
In reality, its probably a good move for both search and Amazon, and in the end, its also good for site builders, as it forces to build a better site!
M
@John Treby – Your AStore is coming through an iFrame, so it probably won’t be affected at all John. The content is not indexed by search engines and all resides on Amazons servers.
M
Yes, my take is that they want to keep their unique, user-generated content for themselves. What’s the point of letting affiliates use it to outrank Amazon for their own products? Have you ever Googled a random sentence from any Amazon review? You will see literally thousands of hits for this duped content. My feeling is that the reviews never added much SEO value to my sites anyway.
I just hope this is NOT anything like the “eBay debacle” – we (EPN affiliates) are still reeling from all that, and Amazon is still a very “safe” and pretty hands-off program all in all, and I hope it stays that way!
I noticed on Niche Site Platform that you can choose to have the reviews show or not. It seems this would solve the problem presented by this latest development from Amazon.
@Chuck – It doesn’t solve it I’m afraid Chuck. Amazon aren’t making reviews available via their API any more, so there will be no data to display. We’re going to have to remove that option from NSP.
@Ben Johnson –
What options are you considering for NSP?
@Chuck – There aren’t any options to speak of. You either get rid of them OR you display an iFrame containing reviews in the format sent by Amazon. You’ll have very little control (if any) over how many you display, what order you display them in or the format/style of them.
Bottom line, most applications which use them will probably remove that function, NSP included.
I can see this is a big problem, but I do not think we get much SEO benefit from the scraped Amazon reviews, they pby cut them off to save bandwidth.
I suppose a naughty app could just scrape the Amazon website for their reviews and republish – but of course that would not be within their new terms and as an affiliate that would not be a wise idea.
Other solutions would be to spin their reviews – a pain and leads to rubbish content.
Writing your own customer reviews would not pass the readers own smell test – they would quickly realise the reviews were all written by the same person.
I guess we will have to go along with it then.
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